The Two Sources Of Morality And Religion

TEXT FLY WITHIN
THE BOOK ONLY

10

< OU_16098l|[n

CQ CO

OSMANIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

Call No. ff<f 'f / fy ^ T" Accession No

Author

This book should he rt'turnoi >n or before ttic ;lme.|cisf prtrked bcrlow

THE TWO SOURCES

OF
MORALITY AND RELIGION

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED

LONDON BOMBAY CALCUTTA MADRAS
MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

NEW YORK BOSTON CHICAGO
DALLAS ATLANTA SAN FRANCISCO

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
OF CANADA, LIMITED

TORONTO

THE TWO SOURCES

OF

MORALITY AND RELIGION

BY

HENRI BERGSON

TRANSLATED BY

R. ASHLEY AUDRA AND

CLOUDESLEY BRERETQN

Y- "

WITH THE ASSISTANCE OF
W. HORSFALL CARTER

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON

COPYRIGHT

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
BY R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, EDINBURGH

TRANSLATORS' PREFACE

IN undertaking to place before the English public M. Henri
Bergson 's great work, which since its publication in March
1932 has gone through seventeen editions, the translators were
confronted at the outset with great difficulties. An example,
of the utmost importance, was the word "morale", which has
a wider meaning in French than in English, conveying both
morality and ethics. There are obvious disadvantages in
attempting to use now the one now the other of these two
terms, though this has in some cases been done. But we have
in most cases kept to the word "morality", and therefore
consider it advisable to inform our readers of the wide
sense in which we use it. As Monsieur Bergson himself says
more than once, "You may attribute what meaning you
like to a word, provided you start by clearly defining that
meaning".

The path of all translation is strewn with stumbling-blocks.
This is especially true of The Two Sources of Morality ahd
Religion. Here the thought is the outcome of twenty-five
years' reflection and research, cast with unfailing skill in the
language in which it was conceived; the language becomes
inseparable from the thought it expresses. That is why the
reader who cares to compare the English with the French text
will find a certain number of passages which might appear at
first sight to have been altered from the original. A closer
study will reveal that this is not the case and that in almost
every instance an effort has been made to convey the meaning
of the French sentence more accurately still than would have
been possible by a word-for-word translation. Monsieur
Bergson realized the difficulties with which the translators
were confronted, and with the kindly courtesy which is
characteristic of him helped them in their task. At his par-
ticular request, and under his guidance, these passages have
been re-written and even re-thought in English. Once recast
in this way, they have been submitted to his final approval.

vi TRANSLATORS 1 PREFACE

The translators and the reader owe him a debt of gratitude
for his generous and careful collaboration.

The translators also wish particularly to thank Mr. W. Hors-
fall Carter, who has helped them with his advice throughout
the work of translation, has taken over from Dr. Cloudesley
Brereton the work of final revision (owing to the latter's ill-
health), and has undertaken the arduous and delicate task
of re-reading the book as a whole, with a fresh mind.
Owing to his remarkable command of his own language,
together with a consummate knowledge of French, his assist-
ance has been of the greatest value.

R. ASHLEY AUDRA
CLOUDESLEY BRERETON

TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER I

PAGE

MORAL OBLIGATION ...... i

Social order and natural order The individual in society
Society in the individual Spontaneous obedience Resist-
ance to resistances Obligation and life The closed society
The call of the hero Propulsive force of emotion
Emotion and creation Emotion and representation Libera-
tion of the soul Forward movement Closed morality and
open morality Self-respect Justice Of intellectualism in
morality Moral education Training and the mystical.

CHAPTER II
STATIC RELIGION ...... 83

Of absurdity in the reasoning being The myth-making
function Myth-making and life Significance of the "vital
impetus'* Part played in society by myth-making General
themes of practical myth-making Assurance against dis-
organization Assurance against depression Assurance
against the unforeseeable On chance The "primitive men-
tality" in civilized man Partial personification of events On
magic in general Magic and science- Magic and religion
Deference paid to animals Totemism BelielT "in goHs
Mythological fantasy The myth-making function and litera-
ture On the existence ofjgxis General function of static
religion.

CHAPTER III
DYNAMIC RELIGION . . . . . .178

Two meanings of the word religion Why we use one word
Greek mysticism Oriental mysticism The prophets of
Israel Christian mysticism Mysticism and regeneration
Philosophic value of mysticism Of the existence of God
Nature of God Creation and love The problem of evil
Survival Of experience and probability in metaphysics.

viii CONTENTS

CHAPTER IV

PAGE

FINAL REMARKS: MECHANICS AND MYSTICISM . . 229

Closed society and open society Persistance of the natural
Characteristics of natural society Natural society and
democracy Natural society and war The Industrial Age
Evolution of tendencies The law of dichotomy Law of
double frenzy Possible return to the simple life Me-
chanics and mysticism.

CHAPTER I

MORAL OBLIGATION

THE remembrance of forbidden fruit is the earliest thing in
the memory of each of us, as it is in that of mankind. We
should notice this, were not this recollection overlaid by
others which we are more inclined to dwell upon. What a
childhood we should have had if only we had been left to do
as we pleased! We should have flitted from pleasure to pleasure.
But all of a sudden an obstacle arose, neither visible nor
tangible: a prohibition. Why did we obey? The question
hardly occurred to us. We had formed the habit of deferring
to our parents and teachers. All the same we knew very well
that it was because they were our parents, because they were
our teachers. Therefore, in our eyes, their authority came less
from themselves than from their status in relation to us.
They occupied a certain station; that was the source of true
command which, had it issued from some other quarter,
would not have possessed the same weight. In other words,
parents and teachers seemed to act by proxy. We did not fully
realize this, but behind our parents and our teachers we had
an inkling of some enormous, or rather some shadowy, thing
that exerted pressure on us through them. Later we would
say it was society. And speculating upon it, we should com-
pare it to an organism whose cells, united by imperceptible
links, fall into their respective places in a highly developed
hierarchy, and for the greatest good of the whole naturally
submit to a discipline that may demand the sacrifice of the
part. This, however, can only be a comparison, for an organ-
ism subject to inexorable laws is one thing, and a society com-
posed'of free wills another. But, once these wills are organized,
they assume the guise of an organism; and in this more or less
artificial organism habit plays the same role as necessity in
the works of nature. From this first standpoint, social life

2 MORAL OBLIGATION CH.

appears to us a system of more or less deeply rooted habits,
corresponding to the needs of the community. Some of them
are habits of command, most of them are habits of obedience,
whether we obey a person commanding by virtue of a mandate
from society, or whether from society itself, vaguely per-
ceived or felt, there emanates an impersonal imperative.
Each of these habits of obedience exerts a pressure on our
will. We can evade it, but then we are attracted towards it,
drawn back to it, like a pendulum which has swung away
from the vertical. A certain order of things has been upset,
it must be restored. In a word, as with all habits, we feel a
sense of obligation.

But in this case the obligation is immeasurably stronger.
When a certain magnitude is so much greater than another
that the latter is negligible in comparison, mathematicians
say that it belongs to another order. So it is with social
obligation. The pressure of it, compared to that of other
habits, is such that the difference in degree amounts to a
difference in kind. It should be noted that all habits of this
nature lend one another mutual support. Although we may
riot speculate on their essence and on their origin, we feel
that they are interrelated, being demanded of us by our im-
mediate surroundings, or by the surroundings of those sur-
roundings, and so on to the uttermost limit, which would be
society. Each one corresponds, directly or indirectly, to a
social necessity; and so they all hang together, they form a
solid block. Many of them would be trivial obligations if they
appeared singly. But they are an integral part of obligation in
general, and this whole, which is what it is owing to the con-
tributions of its parts, in its turn confers upon each one the
undivided authority of the totality. Thus the sum-total comes
to the aid of each of its parts, and the general sentence "do
what duty bids' ' triumphs over the hesitations we might feel
in the presence of a single duty. As a matter of fact, we do not
explicitly think of a mass of partial duties added together
and constituting a single total obligation. Perhaps there is
really not an aggregation of parts. The strength which one
obligation derives from all the others is rather to be com-

i SOCIAL ORDER AND NATURAL ORDER 3

pared to the breath of life drawn, complete and indivisible,
by each of the cells from the depths of the organism of which
it is an element. Society, present within each of its members,
has claims which, whether great or small, each express the
sum-total of its vitality. But let us again repeat that this is
only a comparison. A human community is a collectivity of
free beings. The obligations which it lays down, and which
enable it to subsist, introduce into it a regularity which has
merely some analogy to the inflexible order of the phenomena
of life.

And yet everything conspires to make us believe that this
regularity is comparable with that of nature. I do not allude
merely to the unanimity of mankind in praising certain acts
and blaming others. I mean that, even in those cases where
moral precepts implied in judgments of values are not ob-
served, we contrive that they should appear so. Just as we
do not notice disease when walking along the street, so we do
not gauge the degree of possible immorality behind the ex-
terior which humanity presents to the world. It would take a
good deal of time to become a misanthrope if we confined
ourselves to the observation of others. It is when we detect
our own weaknesses that we come to pity or despise mankind.
The human nature from which we then turn away is the
human nature we have discovered in the depths of our own
being. The evil is so well screened, the secret so universally
kept, that in this case each individual is the dupe of all: how-
ever severely we may profess to judge other men, at bottom
we think them better than ourselves. On this happy illusion
much of our social life is grounded.

It is natural that society should do everything to encourage
this idea. The laws which it promulgates and which maintain
the social order resemble, moreover, in certain aspects, the
laws of nature. I admit that the difference is a radical one in
the eyes of the philosopher. To him the law which enunciates
facts is one thing, the law which commands, another. It is
possible to evade the latter; here we have obligation, not
necessity. The former is, on the contrary, unescapable, for
if any fact diverged from it we should be wrong in having

4 MORAL OBLIGATION en.

assumed it to be a law; there would exist another one, the true
one, formulated in such a way as to express everything we
observe and to which the recalcitrant fact would then con-
form like the rest. True enough; but to the majority of people
the distinction is far from being so clear. A law, be it physical,
social or moral every law is in their eyes a command. There
is a certain order of nature which finds expression in laws:
the facts are presumed to "obey" these laws so as to conform
with that order. The scientist himself can hardly help believ-
ing that the law "governs" facts and consequently is prior to
them, like the Platonic Idea on which all things had to model
themselves. The higher he rises in the scale of generaliza-
tions the more he tends, willy-nilly, to endow the law with
this imperative character; it requires a very real struggle
against our own prepossessions to imagine the principles of
mechanics otherwise than as inscribed from all eternity on
the transcendent tables that modern science has apparently
fetched down from another Sinai. But if physical law tends to
assume in our imagination the form of a command when it
attains to a certain degree of generality, in its turn an impera-
tive which applies to everybody appears to us somewhat like
a law of nature. Between them the two ideas, coming together
in our minds, effect an exchange. The law borrows from the
command its prerogative of compulsion; the command receives
from the law its inevitability. Thus a breach of the social
order assumes a anti-natural character; even when frequently
repeated, it strikes us as an exception, being to society what a
freak creation is to nature.

And suppose we discern behind the social imperative a
religious command? No matter the relation between the two
terms: whether religion be interpreted in one way or another,
whether it be social in essence or by accident, one thing is
certain, that it has always played a social role. This part,
indeed, is a complex one: it varies with time and place;
but in societies such as our own the first effect of religion is
to sustain and reinforce the claims of society. It may go much
further. It goes at least thus far. Society institutes punish-
ments which may strike the innocent and spare the guilty;

i SOCIAL ORDER AND NATURAL ORDER 5

its rewards are few and far between; it takes broad views and
is easily satisfied; what human scales could weigh, as they
should be weighed, rewards and punishments? But, just as
the Platonic Ideas reveal to us, in its perfection and fulness,
that reality which we only see in crude imitations, so religion
admits us to a city whose most prominent features are here
and there roughly typified by our institutions, our laws and
our customs. Here below, order is merely approximate, being
more or less artificially obtained by man; above it is perfect,
and self-creative. Religion therefore, in our eyes, succeeds in
filling in the gap, already narrowed by our habitual way of
looking at things, between a command of society and a law
of nature.

We are thus being perpetually brought back to the same
comparison, defective though it be in many ways, yet appro-
priate enough to the point with which we are dealing. The
members of a civic community hold together like the cells of
an organism. Habit, served by intelligence and imagination,
introduces among them a discipline resembling, in the inter-
dependence it establishes between separate individuals, the
unity of an organism of anastomosic cells.

Everything, yet again, conspires to make social order an
imitation of the order observed in nature. It is evident that
each of us, thinking of himself alone, feels at liberty to follow
his bent, his desire or his fancy, and not consider his fellow-
men. But this inclination has no sooner taken shape than it
comes up against a force composed of the accumulation of all
social forces: unlike individual motives, each pulling its own
way, this force would result in an order not without analogy
to that of natural phenomena. The component cell of an
organism, on becoming momentarily conscious, would barely
have outlived the wish to emancipate itself when it would be
recaptured by necessity. An individual forming part of a
community may bend or even break a necessity of the same
kind, >which to some extent he has helped to create, but to
which, still more, he has to yield; the sense of this necessity,
together with the consciousness of being able to evade it, is
none the less what he calls an obligation. From this point of

6 MORAL ^OBLIGATION CH.

view, and taken in its most usual meaning, obligation is to
necessity what habit is to nature.

It does not come then exactly from without. Each of us
belongs as much to society as to himself. While his conscious-
ness, delving downwards, reveals to him, the deeper he goes,
an ever more original personality, incommensurable with the
others and indeed undefinable in words, on the surface of life
we are in continuous contact with other men whom we
resemble, and united to them by a discipline which creates
between them and us a relation of interdependence. Has the
self no other means of clinging to something solid than by
taking up its position in that part of us which is socialised ?
That would be so if there were no other way of escape from
a life of impulse, caprice and regret. But in our innermost
selves, if we know how to look for it, we may perhaps dis-
cover another sort of equilibrium, still more desirable than
the one on the surface. Certain aquatic plants as they rise
to the surface are ceaselessly jostled by the current: their
leaves, meeting above the water, interlace, thus imparting to
them stability above. But still more stable are the roots,
which, firmly planted in the earth, support them from below.
However, we shall not dwell for the present on the effort to
delve down to the depths of our being. If possible at all, it is
exceptional: and it is on the surface, at the point where it
inserts itself into the close-woven tissue of other exteriorised
personalities, that our ego generally finds its point of attach-
ment; its solidity lies in this solidarity. But, at the point where
it is attached, it is itself socialized. Obligation, which we look
upon as a bond between men, first binds us to ourselves.

It would therefore be a mistake to reproach a purely social
morality with neglecting individual duties. Even if we were
only in theory under a state of obligation towards other men,
we should be so in fact towards ourselves, since social solid-
arity exists only in so far as a social ego is superadded, in
each of us, to the individual self. To cultivate this social ego
is the essence of our obligation to society. Were there not
some part of it in us, it would have no hold on us; and we
scarcely need seek it out, we are self-sufficient, if we find it

i THE INDIVIDUAL IN SOCIETY 7

present within us. Its presence is more or less marked in
different men; but no one could cut himself off from it com-
pletely. Nor would he wish to do so, for he is perfectly aware
that the greater part of his strength comes from this source,
and that he owes to the ever-recurring demands of social life
that unbroken tension of energy, that steadiness of aim in
effort, which ensures the greatest return for his activity.
But he could not do so, even if he wished to, because his
memory and his imagination live on what society has im-
planted in them, because the soul of society is inherent in the
language he speaks, and because even if there is no one
present, even if he is merely thinking, he is still talking to
himself. Vainly do we try to imagine an individual cut off from
all social life. Even materially, Robinson Crusoe on his island
remains in contact with other men, for the manufactured
objects he saved from the wreck, and without which he could
not get along, keep him within the bounds of civilization, and
consequently within those of society. But a moral contact is
still more necessary to him, for he would be soon discouraged
if he had nothing else to cope with his incessant difficulties
except an individual strength of which he knows the limita-
tions. He draws energy from the society to which he remains
attached in spirit; he may not perceive it, still it is there,
watching him: if the individual ego maintains alive and pre-
sent the social ego, it will effect, even in isolation, what it
would with the encouragement and even the support of the
whole of society. Those whom circumstances condemn for a
time to solitude, and who cannot find within themselves the
resources of a deep inner life, know the penalty of "giving
way", that is to say of not stabilising the individual ego at the
level prescribed by the social ego. They will therefore be care-
ful to maintain the latter, so that it shall not relax for one
moment its strictness towards the former. If necessary, they
will seek for some material or artificial support for it. You
remember Kipling's Forest Officer, alone in his bungalow
in the heart of the Indian rukh? He dresses every evening for
dinner, so as to preserve his self-respect in his isolation. 1

1 Kipling, "In the Rukh", from Many Inventions.

8 MORAL OBLIGATION CH.

We shall not go so far as to say that this social ego is Adam
Smith's "impartial spectator", or that it must necessarily be
identified with moral conscience, or that we feel pleased or
displeased with ourselves according as it is favourably or un-
favourably affected. We shall discover deeper sources for our
moral feelings. Language here groups under one name very
different things: what is there in common between the remorse
of a murderer and that racking, haunting pain, also a remorse,
which we may feel at having wounded someone's pride or
been unjust to a child? To betray the confidence of an inno-
cent soul opening out to life is one of the most heinous
offences for a certain type of conscience, which is apparently
lacking in a sense of proportion, precisely because it does not
borrow from society its standards, its gauges, its system of
measurement. This type of conscience is not the one that is
most often at work. At any rate it is more or less sensitive in
different people. Generally the verdict of conscience is the
verdict which would be given by the social self.

And also, generally speaking, moral distress is a throwing-
out of gear of the relations between the social and the in-
dividual self. Analyse the feeling of remorse in the soul of a
desperate criminal. You might mistake it at first for the dread
of punishment, and indeed you find most minute precautions,
perpetually supplemented and renewed, to conceal the crime
and avoid being found out; at every moment comes the awful
thought that some detail has been overlooked and that the
authorities will get hold of the tell-tale clue. But look closer:
what the fellow wants is not so much to evade punishment as
to wipe out the past, to arrange things just as though the crime
had never been committed at all. When nobody knows that a
thing exists, it is almost as if it were non-existent. Thus it is
the crime itself that the criminal wants to erase, by suppressing
any knowledge of it that might come to the human ken. But
his own knowledge persists, and note how it drives him more
and more out of that society within which he hoped to remain
by obliterating the traces of his crime. For the same esteem
for the man he was is still shown to the man he is no longer;
therefore society is not addressing him; it is speaking to some-

i SOCIETY IN THE INDIVIDUAL 9

one else. He, knowing what he is, feels more isolated among his
fellow-men than he would on a desert island; for in his soli-
tude he would carry with him, enveloping him and supporting
him, the image of society; but now he is cut off from the
image as well as the thing. He could reinstate himself in
society by confessing his crime: he would then be treated
according to his deserts, but society would then be speaking
to his real self. He would resume his collaboration with other
men. He would be punished by them, but, having made him-
self one of them, he would be in a small degree the author of
his own condemnation; and a part of himself, the best part,
would thus escape the penalty. Such is the force which will
drive a criminal to give himself up. Sometimes, without going
so far, he will confess to a friend, or to any decent fellow. By
thus putting himself right, if not in the eyes of all, at least in
somebody's eyes, he re-attaches himself to society at a single
point, by a thread: even if he does not reinstate himself in it,
at least he is near it, close to it; he no longer remains alienated
from it; in any case he is no longer in complete rupture with
it, nor with that element of it which is part of himself.

It takes this violent break to reveal clearly the nexus of the
individual to society. In the ordinary way we conform to our
obligations rather than think of them. If we had every time to
evoke the idea, enunciate the formula, it would be much more
tiring to do our duty. But habit is enough, and in most cases
we have only to leave well alone in order to accord to society
what it expects from us. Moreover, society has made matters
very much easier for us by interpolating intermediaries
between itself and us: we have a family; we follow a trade or a
profession; we belong to our parish, to our district, to our
county; and, in cases where the insertion of the group into
society is complete, we may content ourselves, if need be,
with fulfilling our obligations towards the group and so paying
our debts to society. Society occupies the circumference; the
individual is at the centre: from the centre to the circum-
ference are arranged, like so many ever-widening concentric
circles, the various groups to which the individual belongs.
From the circumference to the centre, as the circles grow

io MORAL OBLIGATION CH.

smaller, obligations are added to obligations, and the indi-
vidual ends by finding himself confronted with all of them
together. Thus obligation increases as it advances; but, if it
is more complicated, it is less abstract, and the more easily
accepted. When it has become fully concrete, it coincides
with a tendency, so habitual that we find it natural, to play in
society the part which our station assigns to us. So long as we
yield to this tendency, we scarcely feel it. It only assumes a
peremptory aspect, like all deep-seated habits, if we depart
from it.

It is society that draws up for the individual the pro-
gramme of his daily routine. It is impossible to live a family
life, follow a profession, attend to the thousand and one cares
of the day, do one's shopping, go for a stroll, or even stay at
home, without obeying rules and submitting to obligations.
Every instant we have to choose, and we naturally decide on
what is in keeping with the rule. We are hardly conscious of
this; there is no effort. A road has been marked out by
society; it lies open before us, and we follow it; it would take
more initiative to cut across country. Duty, in this sense, is
almost always done automatically; and obedience to duty, if
we restrict ourselves to the most usual case, might be defined
as a form of non-exertion, passive acquiescence. How comes
it, then, that on the contrary this obedience appears as a state
of strain, and duty itself as something harsh and unbending?
Obviously because there occur cases where obedience implies
an overcoming of self. These cases are exceptions; but we
notice them because they are accompanied by acute con-
sciousness, as happens with all forms of hesitation in fact
consciousness is this hesitation itself; for an action which is
started automatically passes almost unperceived. Thus, owing
to the interdependence of our duties, and because the obliga-
tion as a whole is immanent in each of its parts, all duties are
tinged with the hue taken on exceptionally by one or the other
of them. From the practical point of view this presents no
inconvenience, there are even certain advantages in looking
at things in this way. For, however naturally we do our
duty, we may meet with resistance within ourselves; it is wise

i RESISTANCE TO RESISTANCES n

to expect it, and not take for granted that it is easy to remain
a good husband, a decent citizen, a conscientious worker, in
a word an honest fellow. Besides, there is a considerable
amount of truth in this opinion; for if it is relatively easy to
keep within the social order, yet we have had to enrol in it,
and this enrolment demands an effort. The natural disobedi-
ence of the child, the necessity of education, are proof of this.
It is but just to credit the individual with the consent virtu-
ally given to the totality of his obligation, even if he no longer
needs to take counsel with himself on each one of them. The
rider need only allow himself to be borne along; still he has
had to get into the saddle. So it is with the individual in
relation to society. In one sense it would be untrue, and in
every sense it would be dangerous, to say that duty can be
done automatically. Let us then set up as a practical maxim
that obedience to duty means resistance to self.

But a maxim is one thing, an explanation another. When,
in order to define obligation, its essence and its origin, we lay
down that obedience is primarily a struggle with self, a state
of tension or contraction, we make a psychological error
which has vitiated many theories of ethics. Thus artificial
difficulties have arisen, problems which set philosophers at
variance and which will be found to vanish when we analyse
the terms in which they are expressed. Obligation is in no
sense a unique fact, incommensurate with others, looming
above them like a mysterious apparition. If a considerable
number of philosophers, especially those who follow Kant,
have taken this view, it is because they have confused the
sense of obligation, a tranquil state akin to inclination, with
the violent effort we now and again exert on ourselves to
break down a possible obstacle to obligation.

After an attack of rheumatism, we may feel some discom-
fort and even pain, in moving our muscles and joints. It is the
general sensation of a resistance set up by all our organs
together. Little by little it decreases and ends by being lost in
the consciousness we have of our movements when we are
well. Now, we are at liberty to fancy that it is still there, in an
incipient, or rather a subsiding, condition, that it is only on

12 MORAL OBLIGATION CH.

the look-out for a chance to become more acute; we must
indeed expect attacks of rheumatism if we are rheumatic.
Yet what should we say of a philosopher who saw in our
habitual sensations, when moving our arms and legs, a mere
diminution of pain, and who then defined our motory faculty
as an effort to resist rheumatic discomfort? To begin with, he
would thus be giving up the attempt to account for motory
habits, since each of these implies a particular combination of
movements, and can only be explained by that combination.
The general faculty of walking, running, moving the body, is
but an aggregation of these elementary habits, each of them
finding its own explanation in the special movements it
involves. But having only considered the faculty as a whole,
and having then defined it as a force opposed to a resistance,
it is natural enough to set up rheumatism beside it as an in-
dependent entity. It would seem as though some such error
had been made by many of those who have speculated on
obligation. We have any number of particular obligations,
each calling for a separate explanation. It is natural, or more
strictly speaking, it is a matter of habit to obey them all.
Suppose that exceptionally we deviate from one of them,
there w T ould be resistance; if we resist this resistance, a state of
tension or contraction is likely to result. It is this rigidity
which we objectify when we attribute so stern an aspect to
duty.

It is also what the philosophers have in mind, when they
see fit to resolve obligation into rational elements. In order
to resist resistance, to keep to the right paths, when desire,
passion or interest tempt us aside, we must necessarily give
ourselves reasons. Even if we have opposed the unlawful
desire by another, the latter, conjured up by the will, could
only arise at the call of an idea. In a word, an intelligent being
generally exerts his influence on himself through the medium
of intelligence. But from the fact that we get back to obligation
by rational ways it does not follow that obligation was of a
rational order. We shall dwell on this point later; we do not
intend to discuss ethical theories for the present. Let us
merely say that a tendency, natural or acquired, is one thing,

i RESISTANCE TO RESISTANCES 13

another thing the necessarily rational method which a reason-
able being will use to restore to it its force and to combat
what is opposing it. In the latter case the tendency which has
been obscured may reappear; and then everything doubtless
happens as though we had succeeded by this method in re-
establishing the tendency anew. In reality we have merely
swept aside something that hampered or checked it. It comes
to the same thing, I grant you, in practice: explain the fact in
one way or another, the fact is there, we have achieved success.
And in order to succeed it is perhaps better to imagine that
things did happen in the former way. But to state that this is
actually the case would be to vitiate the whole theory of
obligation. Has not this been the case with most philosophers?
Let there be no misunderstanding. Even if we confine our-
selves to a certain aspect of morality, as we have done up to
now, we shall find many different attitudes towards duty.
They line the intervening space between the extremes of two
attitudes, or rather two habits; that of moving so naturally
along the ways laid down by society as barely to notice them,
or on the contrary hesitating and deliberating on which way to
take, how far to go, the distances out and back we shall have to
cover if we try several paths one after another. In the second
case new problems arise with more or less frequency; and
even in those instances where our duty is fully mapped out,
we make all sorts of distinctions in fulfilling it. But, in the first
place, the former attitude is that of the immense majority of
men; it is probably general in backward communities. And,
after all, however much we may reason in each particular
case, formulate the maxim, enunciate the principle, deduce
the consequences: if desire and passion join in the discussion,
if temptation is strong, if we are on the point of falling, if
suddenly we recover ourselves, what was it that pulled us
up? A force asserts itself which we have called the " totality
of obligation": the concentrated extract, the quintessence of
innumerable specific habits of obedience to the countless
particular requirements of social life. This force is no one par-
ticular thing and, if it could speak (whereas it prefers to act),
it would say: "You must because you must". Hence the work

14 MORAL OBLIGATION CH.

done by intelligence in weighing reasons, comparing maxims,
going back to first principles, was to introduce more logical
consistency into a line of conduct subordinated by its very
nature to the claims of society; but this social claim was the real
root of obligation. Never, in our hours of temptation, should
we sacrifice to the mere need for logical consistency our in-
terest, our passion, our vanity. Because in a reasonable being
reason does indeed intervene as a regulator to assure this
consistency between obligatory rules or maxims, philosophy
has been led to look upon it as a principle of obligation. We
might as well believe that the fly-wheel drives the machinery.
Besides, the demands of a society dovetail into one another.
Even the individual whose decent behaviour is the least based
on reasoning and, if I may put it so, the most conventional, in-
troduces a rational order into his conduct by the mere fact of
obeying rules which are logically connected together. I freely
admit that such logic has been late in taking possession of
society. Logical co-ordination is essentially economy. From a
whole it first roughly extracts certain principles and then
excludes everything which is not in accordance with them.
Nature, by contrast, is lavish. The closer a community is to
nature, the greater the proportion of unaccountable and incon-
sistent rules, it lays down. We find in primitive races many
prohibitions and prescriptions explicable at most by vague
associations of ideas, by superstition, by automatism. Nor
are they without their use, since the obedience of everyone to
laws, even absurd ones, assures greater cohesion to the com-
munity. But in that case the usefulness of the rule solely
accrues, by a kind of reverse action, from the fact of our sub-
mission to it. Prescriptions or prohibitions which are intrin- '
sically useful are those that are explicitly designed for the
preservation or well-being of society. No doubt they have
gradually detached themselves from the others and survived
them. Social demands therefore become reciprocally co-
ordinate and subordinate to principles. But no matter. "Logic
permeates indeed present-day communities, and even the man
who does not reason out his conduct will live reasonably if he
conforms to these principles.

i THE "CATEGORICAL IMPERATIVE" 15

But the essence of obligation is a different thing from a re-
quirement of reason. This is all we have tried to suggest so far.
Our description would, we think, correspond more and more
io reality as one came to deal with less developed communities
and more rudimentary stages of consciousness. It remains a
bare outline so long as we confine ourselves to the normal
conscience, such as is found to-day in the ordinary decent
person. But precisely because we are in this case dealing with
a strange complex of feelings, of ideas and tendencies all
interpenetrating each other, we shall only avoid artificial
analyses and arbitrary syntheses if we have at hand an outline
which gives the essential. Such is the outline we have attempted
to trace. Conceive obligation as weighing on the will like a
habit, each obligation dragging behind it the accumulated
mass of the others, and utilising thus for the pressure it is
exerting the weight of the whole: here you have the totality of
obligation for a simple, elementary, moral conscience. That
is the essential: that is what obligation could, if necessary,
be reduced to, even in those cases where it attains its highest
complexity.

This shows when and in what sense (how slightly Kantian!)
obligation in its elementary state takes the form of a "categor-
ical imperative". We should find it very difficult to discover
examples of such an imperative in everyday life. A military
order, which is a command that admits neither reason nor
reply, does say in fact: "You must because you must". But,
though you may give the soldier no reason, he will imagine
one. If we want a pure case of the categorical imperative, we
must construct one a priori or at least make an arbitrary
abstraction of experience. So let us imagine an ant stirred by
a gleam of reflexion and who thereupon judges she has been
wrong to work unremittingly for others. Her inclination to
laziness would indeed endure but a few moments, just as
long as the ray of intelligence. In the last of these moments,
when instinct regaining the mastery would drag her back by
sheer force to her task, intelligence at the point of relapsing
into instinct would say, as its parting word: "You must
because you must". This "must because you must" would

16 MORAL OBLIGATION CH.

only be the momentary feeling of awareness of a tug which
the ant experiences the tug which the string, momentarily
relaxed, exerts as it drags her back. The same command would
ring in the ear of a sleep-walker on the point of waking, or
even actually beginning to wake, from the dream he is enact-
ing: if he lapsed back at once into a hypnotic state, a categor-
ical imperative would express in words, on behalf of the
reflexion which had just been on the point of emerging and
had instantly disappeared, the inevitableness of the relapse.
In a word, an absolutely categorical imperative is instinctive
or somnambulistic, enacted as such in a normal state, repre-
sented as such if reflexion is roused long enough to take
'form, not long enough to seek for reasons. But, then, is it not
evident that, in a reasonable being, an imperative will tend
to become categorical in proportion as the activity brought
into play, although intelligent, will tend to become instinctive?
But an activity which, starting as intelligent, progresses to-
wards an imitation of instinct is exactly what we call, in man,
a habit. And the most powerful habit, the habit whose
strength is made up of the accumulated force of all the
elementary social habits, is necessarily the one which best
imitates instinct. Is it then surprising that, in the short
moment which separates obligation merely experienced as a
living force from obligation fully realized and justified by all
sorts of reasons, obligation should indeed take the form of the
categorical imperative: "you must because you must"?

Let us consider two divergent lines of evolution with
societies at the extremities of each. The type of society which
will appear the more natural will obviously be the instinctive
type; the link that unites the bees of a hive resembles far
more the link which holds together the cells of an organism,
co-ordinate and subordinate to one another. Let us suppose
for an instant that nature has intended to produce at the
extremity of the second line societies where a certain latitude
was left to individual choice: she would have arranged that
intelligence should achieve here results comparable, as regards
their regularity, to those of instinct in the other; she would
have had recourse to habit. Each of these habits, which may

i THE "CATEGORICAL IMPERATIVE" 17

be called "moral", would be incidental. But the aggregate of
them, I mean the habit of contracting these habits, being at
the very basis of societies and $ necessary condition of their
existence, would have a force comparable to that of instinct
both in respect of intensity and regularity. This is exactly
what we have called the "totality of obligation". This, be it
said, will only apply to human societies at the moment of
emerging from the hands of nature. It will apply to primitive
and to elementary societies. But, however much human
society may progress, grow complicated and spiritualized, the
original design, expressing the purpose of nature, will remain.
Now this is exactly what has happened. Without going
deeply into a matter we have dealt with elsewhere, let us
simply say that intelligence and instinct are forms of con-
sciousness which must have interpenetrated each other in their
rudimentary state and become dissociated as they grew. This
development occurred on the two main lines of evolution of
animal life, with the Arthropodes and the Vertebrates. At the
end of the former we have the instinct of insects, more
especially the Hymenopterae; at the end of the second, human
intelligence. Instinct and intelligence have each as their essen-
tial object the utilisation of implements; in the one case,
invented tools, and therefore varied and unforeseen; in the
other, organs supplied by nature and hence immutable. The
implement is, moreover, designed for a certain type of work,
and this work is all the more efficient the more it is specialized,
the more it is divided up between diversely qualified workers
who mutually supplement one another. Social life is thus
immanent, like a vague ideal, in instinct as well as in intel-
ligence: this ideal finds its most complete expression in the
hive or the ant-hill on the one hand, in human societies on
the other. Whether human or animal, a society is an organiza-
tion; it implies a co-ordination and generally also a sub-
ordination of elements; it therefore exhibits, whether merely
embodied in life or, in addition, specifically formulated, a
collection of rules and laws. But in a hive or an ant-hill the
individual is riveted to his task by his structure, and the
organization is relatively invariable, whereas the human com-

1 8 MORAL OBLIGATION en.

munity is variable in form, open to every kind of progress.
The result is that in the former each rule is laid down by
nature, and is necessary: whereas in the latter only one thing
is natural, the necessity of a rule. Thus the more, in human
society, we delve down to the root of the various obligations
to reach obligation in general, the more obligation will tend
to become necessity, the nearer it will draw, in its peremptory
aspect, to instinct. And yet we should make a great mistake
if we tried to ascribe any particular obligation, whatever it
might be, to instinct. What we must perpetually recall is
that, no one obligation being instinctive, obligation as a whole
would have been instinct if human societies were not, so to
speak, ballasted with variability and intelligence. It is a virtual
instinct, like that which lies behind the habit of speech. The
morality of a human society may indeed be compared to its
language. If ants exchange signs, which seems probable, those
signs are provided by the very instinct that makes the
ants communicate with one another. On the contrary, our
languages are the product of custom. Nothing in the vocabu-
lary, or even in the syntax, comes from nature. But speech is
natural, and unvarying signs, natural in origin, which are
presumably used in a community of insects, exhibit what our
language would have been, if nature in bestowing on us the
faculty of speech had not added that function which, since
it makes and uses tools, is inventive and called intelligence.
We must perpetually recur to what obligation would have been
if human society had been instinctive instead of intelligent:
this will not explain any particular obligation, we shall even
give of obligation in general an idea which w6uld be false, if
we went no further; and yet we must think of this instinctive
society as the counterpart of intelligent society, if we are not
to start without any clue in quest of the foundations of
morality.

From this point of view obligation loses its specific char-
acter. It ranks among the most general phenomena df life.
When the elements which go to make up an organism submit
to a rigid discipline, can we say that they feel themselves
liable to obligation and that they are obeying a social instinct?

i OBLIGATION AND LIFE 19

Obviously not; but whereas such an organism is barely a
community, the hive and the ant-hill are actual organisms,
the elements of which are united by invisible ties, and the
social instinct of an ant I mean the force by virtue of which
the worker, for example, performs the task to which she is
predestined by her structure cannot differ radically from
the cause, whatever it be, by virtue of which every tissue,
every cell of a living body, toils for the greatest good of the
whole. Indeed it is, strictly speaking, no more a matter of
obligation in the one case than in the other, but rather of
necessity. It is just this necessity that we perceive, not actual
but virtual, at the foundations of moral obligation, as through
a more or less transparent veil. A human being feels an obliga-
tion only if he is free, and each obligation, considered separ-
ately, implies liberty. But it is necessary that there should be
obligations; and the deeper we go, away from those particular
obligations which are at the top, towards obligation in
general, or, as we have said, towards obligation as a whole,
which is at the bottom, the more obligation appears as the
very form assumed by necessity in the realm of life, when it
demands, for the accomplishment of certain ends, intelli-
gence, choice, and therefore liberty.

Here again it may be alleged that this applies to very simple
human societies, that is to say primitive or rudimentary
societies. Certainly, but, as we shall have occasion to point out
later, civilized man differs, above all, from primitive man by
the enormous mass of knowledge and habits which he has
absorbed, since the first awakening of his consciousness,
from the social surroundings in which they were stored up.
What is natural is in great measure overlaid by what is
acquired; but it endures, almost unchangeable, throughout
the centuries; habits and knowledge by no means impregnate
the organism to the extent of being transmitted by heredity, as
used to be supposed. It is true that we could consider what is
natural as negligible in our analysis of obligation, if it had been
crushed out by the acquired habits which have accumulated
over it in the course of centuries of civilization. But it re-
mains in excellent condition, very much alive, in the most

20 MORAL OBLIGATION CH.

civilized society. To it we must revert, not to account for this
or that social obligation, but to explain what we have called
obligation as a whole. Our civilized communities, however
different they may be from the society to which we were
primarily destined by nature, exhibit indeed, with respect to
that society, a fundamental resemblance.

For they too are closed societies. They may be very exten-
sive compared to the small agglomerations to which we were
drawn by instinct and which the same instinct would prob-
ably tend to revive to-day if all the material and spiritual
acquisitions of civilization were to disappear from the social
environment in which we find them stored; their essential
characteristic is none the less to include at any moment a
certain number of individuals, and exclude others. We have
said above that underlying moral obligation there was a social
demand. Of what society were we speaking? Was it of that
open society represented by all mankind? We did not settle
the matter, any more than one usually does when speaking of
a man's duty to his fellows; one remains prudently vague;
one refrains from making any assertion, but one would like to
have it believed that "human society" is already an accom-
plished fact. And it is well that we should like to have it
believed, for if incontestably we have duties towards man
as man (although these duties have an entirely different
origin, as we shall see a little later) we should risk under-
mining them, were we to make a radical distinction between
them and our duties to our fellow-citizens. This is right
enough so far as action is concerned. But a moral philosophy
which does not emphasize this distinction misses the truth;
its analyses will thereby be inevitably distorted. In fact, when
we lay down that the duty of respecting the life and property
of others is a fundamental demand of social life, what society
do we mean? To find an answer we need only think what
happens in time of war. Murder and pillage and perfidy,
cheating and lying become not only lawful, they are actually
praiseworthy. The warring nations can say, with Macbeth 's
witches: "Fair is foul, and foul is fair". Would this be possible,
would the transformation take place so easily, generally and

i THE CLOSED SOCIETY 21

instantaneously, if it were really a certain attitude of man to-
wards man that society had been enjoining on us up till then?
Oh, I know what society says (it has, I repeat, its reasons for
saying so); but to know what it thinks and what it wants, we
must not listen too much to what it says, we must look at
what it does. It says that the duties it defines are indeed, in
principle, duties towards humanity, but that under excep-
tional circumstances, regrettably unavoidable, they are for
the time being inapplicable. If society did not express itself
thus, it would bar the road to progress for another morality,
not derived from it, which it has every inducement to humour.
On the other hand, it is consistent with our habits of mind to
consider as abnormal anything relatively rare or exceptional,
disease for instance. But disease is as normal as health, which,
viewed from a certain standpoint, appears as a constant effort
to prevent disease or to avoid it. In the same way, peace has
always hitherto been a preparation for defence or even attack,
at any rate for war. Our social duties aim at social cohesion;
whether we will or no they compose for us an attitude which
is that of discipline in the face of the enemy. This means that,
however much society may endow man, whom it has trained
to discipline, with all it has acquired during centuries of
civilization, society still has need of that primitive instinct
which it coats with so thick a varnish. In a word, the social
instinct which we have detected at the basis of social obliga-
tion always has in view instinct being relatively unchange-
able a closed society, how r ever large. It is doubtless overlaid
by another morality which for that very reason it supports
and to which it lends something of its force, I mean of its
imperative character. But it is not itself concerned with
humanity. For between the nation, however big, and human-
ity there lies the whole distance from the finite to the in-
definite, from the closed to the open. We are fond of saying
that the apprenticeship to civic virtue is served in the family,
and that in the same way, from holding our country dear, we
learn to love mankind. Our sympathies are supposed to
broaden out in an unbroken progression, to expand while
remaining identical, and to end by embracing all humanity.

22 MORAL OBLIGATION CH.

This is a priori reasoning, the result of a purely intellectualist
conception of the soul. We observe that the three groups to
which we can attach ourselves comprise an increasing number
of people, and we conclude that a progressive expansion of
feeling keeps pace with the increasing size of the object we
love. And what encourages the illusion is that, by a fortunate
coincidence, the first part of the argument chances to fit in
with the facts; domestic virtues are indeed bound up with
civic virtues, for the very simple reason that family and
society, originally undifferentiated, have remained closely
connected. But between the society in which we live and
humanity in general there is, we repeat, the same contrast as
between the closed and the open; the difference between the
two objects is one of kind and not simply one of degree. How
much greater it would be if, passing to the realm of feeling,
we compared with each other the two sentiments, love of
country and love of mankind! Who can help seeing that social
cohesion is largely due to the necessity for a community to
protect itself against others, and that it is primarily as against
all other men that we love the men with whom we live? Such
is the primitive instinct. It is still there, though fortunately
hidden under the accretions of civilization; but even to-day
we still love naturally and directly our parents and our fellow-
countrymen, whereas love of mankind is indirect and ac-
quired. We go straight to the former, to the latter we only
come by roundabout ways; for it is only through God, in God,
that religion bids man love mankind; and likewise it is through
reason alone, that Reason in whose communion we are all
partakers, that philosophers make us look at humanity in
order to show us the pre-eminent dignity of the human being,
the right of all to command respect. Neither in the one case
nor the other do we come to humanity by degrees, through the
stages of the family and the nation. We must, in a single
bound, be carried far beyond it, and, without having made it
our goal, reach it by outstripping it. Besides, whether we
speak the language of religion or the language of philosophy,
whether it be a question of love or respect, a different
morality, another kind of obligation supervenes, above and

i THE CALL OF THE HERO 23

beyond the social pressure. So far we have only dealt with
the latter. The time has come to pass to the other.

We have been searching for pure obligation. To find it we
have had to reduce morality to its simplest expression. The
advantage of this has been to indicate in what obligation
consisted; the disadvantage, to narrow down morality enor-
mously. Not indeed because that part of it which we have left
on one side is not obligatory: is there such a thing as a duty
which is not compulsory? But it is conceivable that, starting
from a primitive basis of obligation pure and simple, such as
we have just defined, this obligation should radiate, expand,
and even come to be absorbed into something that trans-
figures it. Let us now see what complete morality would be
like. We shall use the same method and once more proceed,
not downwards as up to now but upwards, to the extreme
limit.

In all times there have arisen exceptional men, incarnat-
ing this morality. Before the saints of Christianity, mankind
had known the sages of Greece, the prophets of Israel, the
Arahahts of Buddhism, and others besides. It is to them that
men have always turned for that complete morality which we
had best call absolute morality. And this very fact is at once
characteristic and instructive; this very fact suggests to us the
existence of a difference of kind and not merely one of degree
between the morality with w r hich we have been dealing up to
now and that we are about to study, between the maximum
and the minimum, between the two extremes. Whereas the
former is all the more unalloyed and perfect precisely in
proportion as it is the more readily reduced to impersonal
formulae, the second, in order to be fully itself, must be in-
carnate in a privileged person who becomes an example. The
generality of the one consists in the universal acceptance of a
law, that of the other in a common imitation of a model.

Why is it, then, that saints have their imitators, and why
do the great moral leaders draw the masses after them? They
ask nothing, and yet they receive. They have no need to ex-
hort; their mere existence suffices. For such is precisely the
nature of this other morality. Whereas natural obligation is a

24 MORAL OBLIGATION CH.

pressure or a propulsive force, complete and perfect morality
has the effect of an appeal.

Only those who have come into touch with a great moral
personality have fully realized the nature of this appeal. But
we all, at those momentous hours when our usual maxims of
conduct strike us as inadequate, have wondered what such or
such a one would have expected of us under the circum-
stances. It might have been a relation or a friend whom we
thus evoked in thought. But it might quite as well have been
a man we had never met, whose life-story had merely been
told us, and to whose judgment we in imagination submitted
our conduct, fearful of his censure, proud of his approval.
It might even be a personality brought up from the depths
of the soul into the light of consciousness, stirring into life
within us, which we felt might completely pervade us later,
and to which we wished to attach ourselves for the time being,
as the disciple to his teacher. As a matter of fact this per-
sonality takes shape as soon as we adopt a model; the longing
to resemble, which ideally generates the form, is an incipient
resemblance; the word which we shall make our own is the
word whose echo we have heard within ourselves. But the
person matters little. Let us merely make the point that,
whereas the first morality was the more potent the more dis-
tinctly it broke up into impersonal obligation, on the contrary
the latter morality, at first dispersed among general precepts
to which our intelligence gave its allegiance, but which did
not go so far as to set our will in motion, becomes more and
more cogent in proportion as the multiplicity and generality
of its maxims merge more completely into a man's unity and
individuality.

Whence does it derive its strength? What is the principle
af action which here takes the place of the natural obligation,
3r rather which ends by absorbing it? To discover this, let us
first see what is tacitly demanded of us. The duties dealt
with so far are those imposed on us by social life; they are
binding in respect of the city more than in respect of humanity.
You might say that the second morality if we do distinguish
two differs from the first in that it is human instead of being

i THE CALL OF THE HERO 25

merely social. And you would not be entirely wrong. For we
have seen that it is not by widening the bounds of the city
that you reach humanity; between a social morality and a
human morality the difference is not one of degree but of
kind. The former is the one of which we are generally thinking
when we feel a natural obligation. Superimposed upon these
clearly defined duties we like to imagine others, the lines of
which are perhaps a little blurred. Loyalty, sacrifice of self,
the spirit of renunciation, charity, such are the words we use
when we think of these things. But have we, generally speaking,
in mind at such times anything more than words? Probably
not, and we fully realize this. It is sufficient, we say, that the
formula is there; it will take on its full meaning, the idea
which is to fill it out will become operative, when the occasion
arises. It is true that for many people the occasion will never
arise or the action will be put off till later. With certain
people the will does make a feeble start, but so feeble that
the slight shock they feel can in fact be attributed to no
more than the expansion of social duty broadened and
weakened into human duty. But only let these formulae be
invested with substance, and that substance become ani-
mate, lo and behold! a new life is proclaimed; we under-
stand, we feel the advent of a new morality. Consequently, in
speaking here of love of humanity we should doubtless be
denoting this morality. And yet we should not be expressing
the essence of it, for the love of humanity is not a self-
sufficient force or one which has a direct efficacy. The teachers
of the young know full well that you cannot prevail over
egoism by recommending "altruism". It even happens that
a generous nature, eager to sacrifice itself, experiences a
sudden chill at the idea that it is working "for mankind".
The object is too vast, the effect too diffuse. We may there-
fore conjecture that if a love of humanity constitutes this
morality, it constitutes it in much the same way as the inten-
tion of reaching a certain point implies the necessity of cross-
ing an intervening space. In one sense it is the same thing; in
another sense it is something entirely different. If we think
only of the interval and the various points, infinite in number,

26 MORAL OBLIGATION CH.

which we still have to pass one by one, we shall be discouraged
from starting, like Zeno's arrow, and besides there would be
no object, no inducement. But if we step across the interven-
ing space, thinking only of the goal or looking even beyond
it, we shall easily accomplish a simple act, and at the same
time overcome the infinite multiplicity of which this simplicity
is the equivalent. What then, in this case, is the goal, what
the direction of the effort? What exactly, in a word, is required
of us?

Let us first define the moral attitude of the man we have
been considering up to now. He is part and parcel of society;
he and it are absorbed together in the same task of individual
and social preservation. Both are self-centred. True, it is
doubtful whether private interest invariably agrees with public
interest: we know against what insurmountable difficulties
utilitarian ethics has always come up when it laid down
the principle that the individual could only seek his own
good, while maintaining that this would lead him to desire the
good of others. An intelligent being, pursuing his personal
advantage, will often do something quite different from what
the general interest demands. Yet, if utilitarian ethics persists
in recurring in one form or another, this means that it is not
untenable, and if it is tenable the reason is precisely because,
beneath the intelligent activity, forced in fact to choose
between its own interests and those of others, there lies a
substratum of instinctive activity, originally implanted there
by nature, where the individual and the social are well-nigh
indistinguishable. The cell lives for itself and also for the
organism, imparting to it vitality and borrowing vitality from
it; it will sacrifice itself to the whole, if need be; and it would
doubtless then say, if it were conscious, that it made this
sacrifice in its own interest. Such would probably be the
state of mind of an ant reflecting on her conduct. She would
feel that her activity hinges on something intermediate
between the good of the ant and the good of the ant-hill.
Now it is just with this fundamental instinct that we have
associated obligation as such: it implies at the beginning a
state of things in which the individual and society are not

i THE CLOSED SOUL AND THE OPEN SOUL 27

distinguishable. This is what enables us to say that the attitude
to which it corresponds is that of an individual and a com-
munity concentrated on themselves. At once individual and
social, the soul here moves round in a circle. It is closed.

The other attitude is that of the open soul. What, in that
case, is allowed in? Suppose we say that it embraces all
humanity: we should not be going too far, we should hardly
be going far enough, since its love may extend to animals, to
plants, to all nature. And yet no one of these things which
would thus fill it would suffice to define the attitude taken by
the soul, for it could, strictly speaking, do without all of
them. Its form is not dependent on its content. We have just
filled it; we could as easily empty it again. "Charity" would
persist in him who possesses "charity", though there be no
other living creature on earth.

Once again, it is not by a process of expansion of the self
that we can pass from the first state to the second. A
psychology which is too purely intellectualist, following the
indications of speech, will doubtless define feelings by the
things with which they are associated; love for one's family,
love for one's country, love of mankind, it will see in these
three inclinations one single feeling, growing ever larger,
to embrace an increasing number of persons. The fact that
these feelings are outwardly expressed by the same attitude
or the same sort of motion, that all three incline us to some-
thing, enables us to group them under the concept "love", and
to express them by one and the same word; we then dis-
tinguish them by naming three objects, each larger than the
other, to which they are supposed to apply. This does in
fact suffice to distinguish them. But does it describe them?
Or analyse them? At a glance, consciousness perceives between
the two first feelings and the third a difference of kind. The
first imply a choice, therefore an exclusion; they may act as
incentives to strife, they do not exclude hatred. The latter is
all love. The former alight directly on an object which attracts
them. The latter does not yield to the attraction of its object;
it has not aimed at this object; it has shot beyond and only
reached humanity by passing through humanity. Has it,

28 MORAL OBLIGATION CH.

strictly speaking, an object? We shall ask this question. But
for the present we shall confine ourselves to noting that this
psychic attitude, or rather psychic motion, is self-sufficient.
Nevertheless there arises in regard to it a problem which
stands ready solved in the case of the other. For the former
was ordained by nature; we have just seen how and why we
: eel bound to adopt it. But the latter is acquired; it calls for,
las always called for, an effort. How comes it that the men
vho have set the example have found other men to follow
hem? And what is the power that is in this case the counter-
>art of social pressure? We have no choice. Beyond instinct
ind habit there is no direct action on the will except feeling.
The impulse given by feeling can indeed closely resemble
obligation. Analyse the passion of love, particularly in its
early stages; is pleasure its aim? Could we not as well say
it is pain? Perhaps a tragedy lies ahead, a whole life wrecked,
wasted, ruined, we know it, we feel it^ no matter, we must
because we must. Indeed the worst perfidy of a nascent passion
is that it counterfeits duty. But we need not go as far as
passion. Into the most peaceful emotion there may enter a
certain demand for action, which differs from obligation as
described above in that it will meet with no resistance, in
that it imposes only what has already been acquiesced in,
but which none the less resembles obligation in that it does
impose something. Nowhere do we see this more clearly
than in those cases where the demand ceases to have any
practical consequence, thus leaving us the leisure to reflect
upon it and analyse what we feel. This is what occurs in
musical emotion, for example. We feel, while we listen, as
though we could not desire anything else but what the music
is suggesting to us, and that that is just as we should naturally
and necessarily act did we not refrain from action to listen.
\Let the music express joy or grief, pity or love, every moment
we are what it expresses. Not only ourselves, but many others,
nay, all the others, too. When music weeps, all humanity,
all nature, weeps with it. In point of fact it does not introduce
these feelings into us; it introduces us into them, as passers-
by are forced into a street dance. Thus do pioneers in morality

i EMOTION AND PROPULSION 29

proceed. Life holds for them unsuspected tones of feeling
like those of some new symphony, and they draw us after
them into this music that we may express it in action.

It is through excess of intellectualism that feeling is made
to hinge on an object and that all emotion is held to be the
reaction of our sensory faculties to an intellectual representa-*
tion. Taking again the example of music, we all know that}
it arouses in us well defined emotions, joy, sorrow, pity, love,
that these emotions may be intense and that to us they are:
complete, though not attached to anything in particular.^
Are you going to say that we are here in the realm of art
and not among real things, that therefore we are playing at
emotion, that our feeling is purely imaginative, and that,
anyway, the musician could not produce this emotion in us,
suggest it without causing it, if we had not already experienced
it in real life, where it was caused by an object from which
art had merely to detach it? That would be to forget that joy
and sorrow, pity and love are words expressing generalities,
words which we must call upon to express what music makes
us feel, whereas each new musical work brings with it new
feelings, which are created by that music, and within that
music, are defined and delimited by the lines, unique of their
kind, of the melody or symphony. They have therefore not
been extracted from life by art; it is we who, in order to
express them in words, are driven to compare the feeling
created by the artist with the feeling most resembling it in
life. But let us then take states of emotion caused in effect by
certain things and, as it were, prefigured in them. Those
ordained by nature are finite, that is to say limited in number.
They are recognizable because they are destined to spur us
on to acts answering to needs. The others, on the contrary,
are real inventions, comparable to those of the musician, at
the origin of which there has always been a man. Thus
mountains may, since the beginning of time, have had the
faculty of rousing in those who looked upon them certain
feelings comparable with sensations, and which were indeed
inseparable from mountains. But Rousseau created in con-
nection with them a new and original emotion. This emotion

30 MORAL OBLIGATION CH.

has become current coin, Rousseau having put it into circula-
tion. And even to-day it is Rousseau who makes us feel it,
as much and more than the mountains. True, there are
reasons why this emotion, sprung from the heart of Jean-
Jacques, should fasten on to mountains rather than any other
object; the elementary feelings, akin to sensations, which were
directly aroused by mountains must have been able to har-
monize with the new emotion. But Rousseau gathered them
together, gave them their places, henceforth as mere har-
monics in a sound for which he provided, by a true creation,
the principal tone. It is the same with love of nature in
general. Nature has ever aroused feelings which are almost
sensations; people have always enjoyed the pleasant shade,
the cool waters, etc., in fine all those things suggested in the
word "amoenus" by which the Romans described the charm
of the country. But a fresh emotion, surely the creation of
some person or persons, has arisen and used these pre-
existing notes as harmonics, and produced in this way some-
thing to be compared with the fresh tones of a new instrument,
what we call in our respective countries the sentiment of
nature. The fundamental tone thus introduced might have
been different, as is the case in the East, in Japan especially,
the timbre would then have been different. Feelings akin to
sensation, closely bound up with the objects which give rise
to them, are indeed just as likely to attract a previously created
emotion as they are to connect with an entirely new one. This is
what happened with love. From time immemorial woman must
have inspired man with an inclination distinct from desire,
but in immediate contact, as though welded to it, and per-
taining both to feeling and to sensation. But romantic love
has a definite date: it sprang up during the Middle Ages
on the day when some person or persons conceived the idea
of absorbing love into a kind of supernatural feeling, into
religious emotion as created by Christianity and launched by
the new religion into the world. When critics reproach
mysticism with expressing itself in the same terms as passion-
ate love, they forget that it was love which began by
plagiarizing mysticism, borrowing from it its fervour, its

i EMOTION AND CREATION 31

raptures, its ecstasies: in using the lahguage of a passion it
f .had transfigured, mysticism has only resumed possession of
its own. We may add that the nearer love is to adoration, the
greater the disproportion between the emotion and the object,
the deeper therefore the disappointment to which the lover
, is exposed unless he decides that he will ever look at the
object through the mist of the emotion and never touch it,
that he will, in a word, treat it religiously. Note that the
ancients had already spoken of the illusions of love, but these
were errors akin to those of the senses, and they concerned
the face of the beloved, her figure, her bearing, her character.
Think of Lucretius' description: the illusion here applies
only to the qualities of the loved one, and not, as with the
modern illusion, to what we can expect of love. Between the
old illusion and the illusion we have superadded to it there
is the same difference as between the primitive feeling,
emanating from the object itself, and the religious emotion
summoned from without by which it has been pervaded and
eventually submerged. The margin left for disappointment
is now enormous, for it is the gap between the divine and
the human.

That a new emotion is the source of the great creations of
art, of science and of civilization in general there seems to
be no doubt. Not only because emotion is a stimulus,
because it incites the intelligence to undertake ventures and
the will to persevere with them. We must go much further.
There are emotions which beget thought; and invention,
though it belongs to the category of the intellect, may partake
of sensibility in its substance. For we must agree upon the
meaning of the words "emotion", "feeling" and "sensibility".
An emotion is an affective stirring of the soul, but a surface
agitation is one thing, an upheaval of the depths another.
The effect is in the first case diffused, in the second it remains
undivided. In the one it is an oscillation of the parts without
any displacement of the whole; in the other the whole is
driven forward. Let us, however, get away from metaphors.
We must distinguish between two kinds of emotion, two
varieties of feeling, two manifestations of sensibility which

32 MORAL OBLIGATION CH.

have this one feature in common, that they are emotional
states distinct from sensation, and cannot be reduced, like
the latter, to the psychical transposition of a physical stimulus.
In the first case the emotion is the consequence of an idea,
or of a mental picture; the "feeling" is indeed the result of an
intellectual state which owes nothing to it, which is self-
sufficient, and which, if it does experience a certain re-action
from the feeling, loses more than it gains. It is the stirring of
sensibility by a representation, as it were, dropped into it.
But the other kind of emotion is not produced by a repre-
sentation which it follows and from which it remains distinct.
Rather is it, in relation to the intellectual states which are to
supervene, a cause and not an effect; it. is pregnant with
representations, not one of which is actually formed, but
which it draws or might draw from its own substance by an
organic development. The first is infra-intellectual; that is
the one with which the psychologist is generally concerned,
and it is this we have in mind when we contrast sensibility
with intelligence, and when we make of emotions a vague
reflection of the representation. But of the other we should
be inclined to say that it is supra-intellectual, if the word did
not immediately and exclusively evoke the idea of superiority
of value: it is just as much a question of priority in time, and
of the relation between that which generates and that which
is generated. Indeed, the second kind of emotion can alone
be productive of ideas.

This is just what the critic overlooks when he qualifies
as "feminine", with a touch of contempt, a psychology which
accords so extensive and so handsome a place to sensibility.
First of all he should be blamed for abiding by the current
commonplaces about women, when it is so easy to use one's
eyes. I do not intend, for the mere sake of correcting an
inappropriate word, to enter upon a comparative study of the
two sexes. Suffice it to say that woman is as intelligent as
man, but that she is less capable of emotion, and that if there
is any faculty or power of the soul which seems to attain less
development in woman than in man, it is not intelligence,
but sensibility. I mean of course sensibility in the depths, not

i EMOTION AND CREATION 33

agitation at the surface. 1 But no matter. Still more is the
critic to be blamed, when he fancies that he would under-
value man if he related to sensibility the highest faculties
of the mind, for not seeing precisely where the difference lies
between that intelligence which understands, discusses,
accepts or rejects which in a word limits itself to criticism
and the intelligence which invents.

Creation signifies, above all, emotion, and that not in
literature or art alone. We all know the concentration and
effort implied in scientific discovery. Genius has been defined
as "an infinite capacity for taking pains". True, we think of
intelligence as something apart, and, too, as something equally
apart a general faculty of attention which, when more or
less developed, is supposed to produce a greater or less con-
centration of intelligence. But how could this indeterminate
attention, extraneous to intelligence, bring out of intelligence
something which is not there? We cannot help feeling that
psychology is once more the dupe of language when, having
used the same word to denote all efforts of attention made in
all possible cases, and having thus been deceived into assum-
ing them to be all of the same quality, it only perceives
between them differences of degree. The truth is that in each
case attention takes on a distinctive colouring, as though
individualized by the object to which it applies: this is why
psychology has already a tendency to use the term "interest"
as much as "attention", thus implicitly introducing sensibility,
as being capable of more extensive variation according to
particular cases. But then this diversity is not sufficiently
insisted upon; a general faculty of being interested is posited,

1 We need hardly say that there are many exceptions. Religious fervour,
for example, can attain, in women, to undreamt-of depths. But nature has
probably ordained, as a general rule, that woman should concentrate on
her child and confine within somewhat narrow bounds the best of her
sensibility. In this department she is indeed incomparable; here the
emotion is supra-intellectual in that it becomes divination. How many
things rise up in the vision of a mother as she gazes in wonder upon her
little one? Illusion perhaps! This is not certain. Let us rather say that
reality is big with possibilities, and that the mother sees in the child not
only what he will become, but also what he would become, if he were not
obliged, at every step in his life, to choose and therefore to exclude.

34 MORAL OBLIGATION CH.

which, while always the same faculty, once again affords
variety only through a greater or less application to its object.
So do not let us speak of interest in general. Let us rather
say that the problem which has aroused interest is a repre-
sentation duplicated by an emotion, and that the emotion,
being at one and the same time curiosity, desire and the
anticipated joy of solving a stated problem, is, like the
representation, unique. It is the emotion which drives the
intelligence forward in spite of obstacles. It is the emotion
above all which vivifies, or rather vitalizes, the intellectual
elements with which it is destined to unite, constantly col-
lecting everything that can be w r orked in with them and
finally compelling the enunciation of the problem to expand
into its solution. And what about literature and art? A work
of genius is in most cases the outcome of an emotion, unique
of its kind, which seemed to baffle expression, and yet which
had to express itself. But is not this so of all work, however
imperfect, into which there enters some degree of creative-
ness? Anyone engaged in writing has been in a position to
feel the difference between an intelligence left to itself and
that which burns with the fire of an original and unique
emotion, born of the identification of the author with his
subject, that is to say of intuition. In the first case the mind
cold-hammers the materials, combining together ideas long
since cast into words and which society supplies in a solid
form. In the second, it would seem that the solid materials
supplied by intelligence first melt and mix, then solidify
again into fresh ideas now shaped by the creative mind itself.
If these ideas find words already existing which can express
them, for each of them this seems a piece of unexpected good
luck; and, in truth, it has often been necessary to assist for-
tune, and strain the meaning of a word, to mould it to the
thought. In that event the effort is painful and the result
problematical. But it is in such a case only that the mind
feels itself, or believes itself, to be creative. It no longer
starts from a multiplicity of ready-made elements to arrive
at a composite unity made up of a new arrangement of the
old. It has been transported at a bound to something which

i EMOTION AND CREATION 35

seems both one and unique, and which will contrive later to
express itself, more or less satisfactorily, in concepts both
multiple and common, previously provided by language.

To sum up, alongside of the emotion which is a result
of the representation and which is added to it, there is the
emotion which precedes the image, which virtually contains
it, and is to a certain extent its cause. A play may be scarcely
a work of literature and yet it may rack our nerves and cause
an emotion of the first kind, intense, no doubt, but common-
place, culled from those we experience in the course of daily
life, and in any case devoid of mental content. But the
emotion excited within us by a great dramatic work is of quite
a distinct character. Unique of its kind, it has sprung up in
the soul of the poet and there alone, before stirring our own;
from this emotion the work has sprung, to this emotion the
author was continually harking back throughout the com-
position of the work. It was no more than a creative exigency,
but it was a specific one, now satisfied once the work is
finished, which would not have been satisfied by some other
work unless that other had possessed an inward and pro-
found resemblance with the former, such as that which exists
between two equally satisfactory renderings, in terms of ideas
or images, of one and the same melody.

Which amounts to saying that, in attributing to emotion a
large share in the genesis of the moral disposition, we are
not by any means enunciating a " moral philosophy of senti-
ment ". For we are dealing with an emotion capable of
crystallising into representations and even into an ethical
doctrine. From this particular doctrine we could never have
elicited that morality any more than from any other; no
amount of speculation will create an obligation or anything
like it: the theory may be all very fine, I shall always be able
to say that I will not accept it; and even if I do accept it,
I shall claim to be free and do as I please. But if the atmosphere
of the emotion is there, if I have breathed it in, if it has entered
my being, I shall act in accordance with it, uplifted by it; not
from constraint or necessity, but by virtue of an inclination
which I should not want to resist. And instead of explaining

36 MORAL OBLIGATION CH.

my act by emotion itself, I might in this case just as well
deduce it from the theory built up by the transposition of
that emotion into ideas. We here get a glimpse of the possible
reply to a weighty question which we have just touched on
incidentally and with which we shall be confronted later.
People are fond of saying that if a religion brings us a new
morality, it imposes that morality by means of the meta-
physics which it disposes us to accept, by its ideas on God,
the universe, the relation of the one to the other. To which
the answer has been made that it is, on the contrary, by the
superiority of its morality that a religion wins over souls
and reveals to them a certain conception of things. But would
intelligence recognize the superiority of the proposed morality,
since it can only appreciate differences of value by comparing
them with a rule or an ideal, and this ideal and this rule are
perforce supplied by the morality which is already in occupa-
tion? On the other hand, how could a new conception of the
universal order of things be anything but yet another
philosophy to set alongside of those we know? Even if our
intelligence is won over, we shall never see in it anything
but an explanation, theoretically preferable to the others.
Even if it seems to enjoin on us, as more in harmony with
itself, certain rules of conduct, there will be a wide gap
between this assent of the intellect and a conversion of the
will. But the truth is that the doctrine cannot, as a purely
intellectual representation, ensure the adoption and, above all,
the practice of the corresponding morality, any more than the
particular morality, considered by intelligence as a system 6f
rules of conduct, can render the doctrine intellectually prefer-
able. Antecedent to the new morality, and also the new meta-
physics, there is the^mption, which develops as an impetus
in the realm of the will, and as an explicative representation
in that of intelligence. Take, for example, the emotion
introduced by Christianity under the name of charity: if it
wins over souls, a certain behaviour ensues and a certain
doctrine is disseminated. But neither has its metaphysics
enforced the moral practice, nor the moral practice induced a
disposition to its metaphysics. Metaphysics and morality

I EMOTION AND REPRESENTATION 37

express here the self-same thing, one in terms of intelligence,
the other in terms of will; and the two expressions of the
thing are accepted together, as soon as the thing is there to
be expressed.

That a substantial half of our morality includes duties'
whose obligatory character is to be explained fundamentally
by the pressure of society on the individual will be readily
granted, because these duties are a matter of current practice,
because they have a clear precise formula, and it is therefore
easy for us, by grasping them where they are entirely visible,
and then going down to the roots, to discover the social
requirements from which they sprang. But that the rest of
morality expresses a certain emotional state, that actually
we yield not to a pressure but to an attraction, many people
will hesitate to acknowledge. The reason is that here we can-
not, generally speaking, get back to the original emotion in
the depths of our hearts. There exist formulae which are
the residue of this emotion, and which have settled in what
we may call the social conscience according as, within that
emotion, a new conception of life took form or rather a
certain attitude towards life. Precisely because we find our-
selves in the presence of the ashes of an extinct emotion, and
because the driving power of that emotion came from the fire
within it, the formulae which have remained would generally
be incapable of rousing our will, if older formulae, expressing
the fundamental requirements of social life, did not by con-
tagious influence communicate to them something of their
obligatory character. These two moralities, placed side by
side, appear now to be only one, the former having lent to
the latter something of its imperative character and having,
on the other hand, received from it in exchange a connotation
less strictly social, more broadly human. But let us stir the
ashes, we shall find some of them still warm, and at length
the sparks will kindle into flame; the fire may blaze up again;
and, if it does, it will gradually spread. I mean that the maxims
of the second morality do not work singly, like those of the
first: as soon as one of them, ceasing to be abstract, becomes
filled with significance and acquires the capacity to act, the

38 MORAL OBLIGATION CH.

others tend to do the same: at last they all fuse in the warm
emotion which left them behind long ago, and in the men,
now come to life again, who experienced it. Founders and
reformers of religions, mystics and saints, obscure heroes of
moral life whom we have met on our way and who are in
our eyes the equals of the greatest, they are all there: inspired
by their example, we follow them, as if we were joining an
army of conquerors. They are indeed conquerors: they have
broken down natural resistance and raised humanity to a new
destiny. Thus, when we dispel appearances to get at reality,
when we set aside the common form assumed, thanks to
mutual exchanges, by the two moralities in conceptual
thought and in speech, then, at the two extremes of the single
morality we find pressure and aspiration: the former the more
perfect as it becomes more impersonal, closer to those natural
forces which we call habit or even instinct, the latter the more
powerful according as it is more obviously aroused in us by
definite persons, and the more it apparently triumphs over
nature. True, if we went down to the roots of nature itself
we might find that it is the same force manifesting itself
directly, as it rotates on its own axis, in the human species
once constituted, and subsequently acting indirectly, through
the medium of privileged persons, in order to drive humanity
forward.

But there is no need to resort to metaphysics to determine
the relation between this pressure and this aspiration. Once
again, there is some difficulty in comparing the two moralities
' because they are no longer to be found in a pure state. The
first has handed on to the second something of its compulsive
force; the second has diffused over the other something of its
perfume. We find ourselves in the presence of a series of
steps up or down, according as we range through the dictates
of morality from one extreme or from the other; as to the
two extreme limits, they have chiefly a theoretical interest;
it is not often that they are actually attained. Let us, neverthe-
less, consider separately, in themselves, pressure and aspira-
tion. Immanent in the former is the representation of a
society which aims only at self-preservation; the circular

i LIBERATION OF THE SOUL 39

movement in which it carries round with it individuals, as it
revolves on the same spot, is a vague imitation, through the
medium of habit, of the immobility of instinct. The feeling
which would characterize the consciousness of these pure
obligations, assuming they were all fulfilled, would be a
state of individual and social well-being similar to that which
Accompanies the normal working of life. It would resemble
pleasure rather than joy. The morality of aspiration, on the
contrary, implicitly contains the feeling of progress. The
emotion of which we were speaking is the enthusiasm of
a forward movement, enthusiasm by means of which this
morality has won over a few and has then, through them,
spread over the world. "Progress" and "advance", moreover,
are in this case indistinguishable from the enthusiasm itself.
^To become conscious of them it is not necessary that we
[should picture a goal that we are trying to reach or a perfec-
tion to which we are approximating. It is enough that the joy
of enthusiasm involves something more than the pleasure of
well-being; the pleasure not implying the joy, while the joy
does imply and encompass the pleasure. We feel this to be
so, and the certainty thus obtained, far from hinging on a
metaphysical theory, is what will provide it with its firmest
support.

But antecedent to this metaphysical theory, and far nearer
to what we have directly experienced, are the simpler repre-
sentations, which in this case spring from the emotion, in pro-
portion as we dwell on it. We were speaking of the founders
and reformers of religion, the mystics and the saints. Let us
hearken to their language; it merely expresses in representa-
tions the emotions peculiar to a soul opening out, breaking
with nature, which enclosed it both within itself and within
the city.

They begin by saying that what they experience is a feeling
of liberation. Well-being, pleasures, riches, all those things
that mean so much to the common run of men, leave them
indifferent. In breaking away from them they feel relief, and
then exhilaration. Not that nature was wrong in attaching us
by strong ties to the life she had ordained for us. But we must

40 MORAL OBLIGATION CH.

go further, and the amenities which are real comforts at home
would become hindrances, burdensome impedimenta, if we
had to take them on our travels. That a soul thus equipped
for action would be more drawn to sympathize with other
souls, and even with the whole of nature, might surprise us,
if the relative immobility of the soul, revolving in a circle in
an enclosed society, was not due precisely to the fact that
nature has split humanity into a variety of individuals by the
very act which constituted the human species. Like all acts
creative of a species, this was a halt on the road. By a resump-
tion of the forward movement, the decision to break is broken.
True, to obtain a complete effect, the privileged soul would
have to carry the rest of humanity with it. But if a few follow,
and if the others imagine they would do likewise on occasion,
this already means a great deal; henceforth, with the begin-
ning of accomplishment, there will be the hope that the circle
may be broken in the end. In any case, we cannot repeat too
often that it is not by preaching the love of our neighbour
that we can obtain it. It is not by expanding >our narrower
feelings that we can embrace humanity. However much our
intelligence may convince itself that this is the line of advance,
things behave differently. What is simple for our understand-
ing is not necessarily so for our will. In cases where logic
affirms that a certain road should be the shortest, experience
intervenes, and finds that in that direction there is no road.
The truth is that heroism may be the only way to love. Now,
heroism cannot be preached, it has only to show itself, and
its mere presence may stir others to action. For heroism itself
is a return to movement, and emanates from an emotion
infectious like all emotions akin to the creative act. Religion
expresses this truth in its own way by saying that it is in God
that we love all other men. And all great mystics declare that
they have the impression of a current passing from their soul
to God, and flowing back again from God to mankind.

Let no one speak of material obstacles to a soul thus freed!
It will not answer that we can get round the obstacle, or that
we can break it; it will declare that there is no obstacle. We
cannot even say of this moral conviction that it moves

i FORWARD MOVEMENT 41

mountains, for it sees no mountains to move. So long as you
argue about the obstacle, it will stay where it is; and so long
as you look at it, you will divide it into parts which will have
to be overcome one by one; there may be no limit to their
number; perhaps you will never exhaust them. But you can
do away with the whole, at a stroke, if you deny its existence.
That is what the philosopher did who proved movement by
walking: his act was the negation pure and simple of the
effort, perpetually to be renewed, and therefore fruitless,
which Zeno judged indispensable to cover, one by one, the
stages of the intervening space. By going deeply into this new
aspect of morality, we should find an impression of coinci-
dence, real or imaginary, with the generative effort of life. If
seen from outside, the activity of life lends itself, in each of
its works, to an analysis which might be carried on indefinitely;
there is no end to a description of the structure of an eye such
as ours. But what we call a series of means employed is, in
reality, but a number of obstacles overcome; the action of
nature is simple, and the infinite complexity of the mechanism
which it seems to have built up piece by piece to achieve the
power of vision is but the endless network of opposing forces
which have cancelled one another out to secure an uninter-
rupted channel for the functioning of the faculty. It is similar
to the simple act of an invisible hand plunged into iron filings,
which, if we only took into account what we saw, would seem
like an inexhaustible interplay of actions and reactions among
the filings themselves in order to effect an equilibrium. If
such is the contrast between the real working of life and the
aspect it presents to the senses and the intelligence which
analyse it, is it surprising that a soul which no more recognizes
any material obstacle should feel itself, rightly or wrongly, at
one with the principle of life?

Whatever heterogeneity we may at first find between the
effect and the cause, and though the distance is great from
a rule of conduct to a power of nature, it has always
been from the contact with the generative principle of the
human species that a man has felt he drew the strength to
love mankind. By this I mean, of course, a love which absorbs

D

42 . MORAL OBLIGATION CH.

and kindles the whole soul. But a more lukewarm love, faint
and fleeting, can only be a radiation of the former, if not a
still paler and colder image of it, left behind in the mind or
deposited in speech. Thus, morality comprises two different
parts, one of which follows from the original structure of
human society, while the other finds its explanation in the
principle which explains this structure. In the former, obliga-
tion stands for the pressure exerted by the elements of society
on one another in order to maintain the shape of the whole;
a pressure whose effect is prefigured in each of us by a system
of habits which, so to speak, go to meet it: this mechanism, of
which each separate part is a habit, but whose whole is com-
parable to an instinct, has been prepared by nature. In the
second, there is still obligation, if you will, but that obligation
is the force of an aspiration or an impetus, of the very impetus
which culminated in the human species, in social life, in a
system of habits which bears a resemblance more or less to
instinct: the primitive impetus here comes into play directly,
and no longer through the medium of the mechanisms it had
set up, and at which it had provisionally halted. In short, to
sum up what has gone before, we should say that nature,
setting down the human species along the line of evolution,
intended it to be sociable, in the same way as it did the com-
munities of ants and bees; but since intelligence was there,
the maintenance of social life had to be entrusted to an all but
intelligent mechanism: intelligent in that each piece could be
remodelled by human intelligence, yet instinctive in that man
could not, without ceasing to be a man, reject all the pieces
together and cease to accept a mechanism of preservation.
Instinct gave place temporarily to a system of habits, each
one of which became contingent, their convergence towards
the preservation of society being alone necessary, and this
necessity bringing back instinct with it. The necessity of the
whole, felt behind the contingency of the parts, is what we
call moral obligation in general; it being understood that the
parts are contingent in the eyes of society only; to the in-*
dividual, into ivhom society inculcates its habits, the part is
as necessary as the whoj^jfjfow the mechanism designed by

I FORWARD MOVEMENT 43

nature was simple, like the societies originally constituted by
her. Did she foresee the immense development and the end-
less complexities of societies such as ours? Let us first agfee
as to the meaning of this question. We do not assert that
nature has, strictly speaking, designed or foreseen anything
whatever. But we have the right to proceed like a biologist,
who speaks of nature's intentions every time he assigns a
function to an organ: he merely expresses thus the adequate-
ness of the organ to the function. In spite of humanity having
become civilized, in spite of the transformation of society,
we maintain that the tendencies which are, as it were, organic
in social life have remained what they were in the beginning.
We can trace them back and study them. The result of this
investigation is clear; it is for closed, simple societies that
the moral structure, original and fundamental in man, is
made. I grant that the organic tendencies do not stand out
clearly to our consciousness. They constitute, nevertheless,
the strongest element of obligation. However complex our
morality has grown and though it has become coupled with
tendencies which are not mere modifications of natural tend-
encies, and whose trend is not in the direction of nature, it is
to these natural tendencies that we come in the end, when
we want to obtain a precipitate of the pure obligation con-
tained in this fluid mass. Such then is the first half of
morality. The other had no place in nature's plan. We mean
that nature foresaw a certain expansion of social life through
intelligence, but it was to be a limited expansion. She could
not have intended that this should go on so far as to endanger
the original structure. Numerous indeed are the instances
where man has thus outwitted nature, so knowing and wise,
yet so simple-minded. Nature surely intended that men should
beget men endlessly, according to the rule followed by all
other living creatures; she took the most minute precautions
to ensure the preservation of the species by the multiplication
of individuals; hence she had not foreseen, when bestowing
on us intelligence, that intelligence would at once find a
way of divorcing the sexual act from its consequences, and
that man might refrain from reaping without forgoing the

44 MORAL OBLIGATION CH.

pleasure of sowing. It is in quite another sense that man out-
wits nature when he extends social solidarity into the brother-
hood of man; but he is deceiving her too, in another way, for
those societies whpse design was prefigured in the original
structure of the human soul, and of which we can still per-
ceive the plan in the innate and fundamental tendencies of
modern man, required that the group be closely united, but
that between group and group there should be virtual
hostility; we were always to be prepared for attack or defence.
Not, of course, that nature designed war for war's sake.
Those leaders of humanity drawing men after them, who
have broken down the gates of the city, seem indeed to have
thereby found their place again in the direction of the vital
impetus. But this impetus inherent in life is, like life, finite.
Its path is strewn with obstacles, and the species which have
appeared, one after the other, are so many combinations of
this force with opposing forces: the former urging us for-
ward, the others making us turn in a circle. Man, fresh from
the hands of nature, was a being both intelligent and social,
his sociability being devised to find its scope in small com-
munities, his intelligence being designed to further individual
and group life. But intelligence, expanding through its own
efforts, has developed unexpectedly. It has freed men from
restrictions to which they were condemned by the limitations
of their nature. This being so, it was not impossible that some
of them, specially gifted, should reopen that which was closed
and do, at least for themselves, what nature could not possibly
have done for mankind. Their example has ended in leading
others forward, in imagination at least. There is a genius of
the will as there is a genius of the mind, and genius defies all
anticipation. Through those geniuses of the will, the impetus
of life, traversing matter, wrests from it, for the future of the
species, promises such as were out of the question when the
species was being constituted. Hence in passing from social
solidarity to the brotherhood of man, we break with one par-
ticular nature, but not with all nature. It might be said, by
slightly distorting the terms of Spinoza, that it is to get back
to natura naturans that we break away from natura naturata.

i FORWARD MOVEMENT 45

Hence, between the first morality and the second, lies the
whole distance between repose and movement. The first is
supposed to be immutable. If it changes, it immediately
forgets that it has changed, or it acknowledges no change.
The shape it assumes at any given time claims to be the final
shape. But the second is a forward thrust, a demand for move-
ment; it is the very essence of mobility. Thus would it prove,
thus alone, indeed, would it be able at first to define, its
superiority. Postulate the first, you cannot bring the second
out of it, any more than you can from one or several posi-
tions of a moveable body derive motion. But, on the con-
trary, movement includes immobility, each position traversed
by the moving object being conceived and even perceived as
a virtual stop. But a detailed demonstration is unnecessary:
the superiority is experienced before ever it is represented,
and furthermore could not be demonstrated afterwards if it
had not first been felt. There is a difference of vital tone.
Those who regularly put into practice the morality of the
city know this feeling of well-being, common to the in-
dividual and to society, which is the outward sign of the
interplay of material resistances neutralizing each other. But
the soul that is opening, and before whose eyes material
objects vanish, is lost in sheer joy. Pleasure and well-being
are something, joy is more. For it is not contained in these,
whereas they are virtually contained in joy. They mean,
indeed, a halt or a marking time, while joy is a step forward.

That is why the first morality is comparatively easy to for-
mulate, but not the second. For our intelligence and our
language deal in fact with things; they are less at home in
representing transitions or progress. The morality of the
Gospels is essentially that of the open soul: are we not justified
in pointing out that it borders upon paradox, and even upon
contradiction, in its more definite admonitions? If riches are
an evil, should we not be injuring the poor in giving them
what we possess? If he who has been smitten on the one cheek
is to offer the other also, what becomes of justice, without
which, after all, there can be no "charity"? But the paradox
disappears, the contradiction vanishes, if we consider the

46 MORAL OBLIGATION CH.

intent of these maxims, which is to create a certain dis-
position of the soul. It is not for the sake of the poor, but for
his own sake, that the rich man should give up his riches:
blessed are the poor "in spirit"! The beauty lies, not in being
deprived, not even in depriving oneself, but in not feeling
the deprivation. The act by which the soul opens out
broadens and raises to pure spirituality a morality enclosed
and materialized in ready-made rules: the latter then be-
comes, in comparison with the other, something like a snap-
shot view of movement. Such is the inner meaning of the
antitheses that occur one after the other in the Sermon on
the Mount: "Ye have heard that it was said ... I say unto
you. . ." On the one hand the closed, on the other the open.
Current morality is not abolished; but it appears like a virtual
stop in the course of actual progression. The old method is
not given up; but it is fitted into a more general method, as
is the case when the dynamic reabsorbs the static, the latter
then becoming a mere particular instance of the former. We
should need then, strictly speaking, a means of expressing
directly the movement and the tendency; but if we still want
and we cannot avoid it to translate them into the language
of the static and the motionless, we shall be confronted with
formulae that border on contradiction. So we might compare
what is impracticable in certain precepts of the Gospels to
what was illogical in the first explanations of the differential
calculus. Indeed, between the morality of the ancients and
Christianity we should find much the same relation as that
between the mathematics of antiquity and our own.

The geometry of the ancients may have provided particular
solutions which were, so to say, an anticipated application
of our general methods; but it never brought out these
methods; the impetus was not there which would have
made them spring from the static to the dynamic. But at
any rate it carried as far as possible the imitation of the
dynamic by the static. Now, we have just the same impression
when we compare, for example, the doctrine of the Stoics
with Christian morality. The Stoics proclaimed themselves
citizens of the world, and added that all men were brothers,

i CLOSED MORALITY AND OPEN MORALITY 47

having come from the same God. The words were almost the
same; but they did not find the same echo, because they were
not spoken with the same accent. The Stoics provided some
very fine examples. If they did not succeed in drawing
humanity after them, it is because Stoicism is essentially a
philosophy. The philosopher who is so enamoured of this
noble doctrine as to become wrapped up in it doubtless
vitalizes it by translating it into practice; just so did Pyg-
malion's love breathe life into the statue once it was carven.
But it is a far cry from this emotion to the enthusiasm which
spreads from soul to soul, unceasingly, like a conflagration.
Such an emotion may indeed develop into ideas which make
up a doctrine, or even several different doctrines having no
other resemblance between them than a kinship of the spirit;
but it precedes the idea instead of following it. To find some-
thing of the kind in classical antiquity, we must not go to the
Stoics, but rather to the man who inspired all the great
philosophers of Greece without contributing any system,
without having written anything, Socrates. Socrates indeed
exalts the exercise of reason, and particularly the logical
function of the mind, above everything else. The irony he
parades is meant to dispose of opinions which have not under-
gone the test of reflection, to put them to shame, so to speak,
by setting them in contradiction with themselves. Dialogue,
as he understands it, has given birth to the Platonic dialectics
and consequently to the philosophical method, essentially
rational, which we still practice. The object of such a dialogue
is to arrive at concepts that may be circumscribed by defini-
tions; these concepts will become the Platonic Ideas; and the
theory of Ideas, in its turn, will serve as a model for the
systems, also essentially rational, of traditional metaphysics.
Socrates goes further still; virtue itself he holds to be a science,
he identifies the practice of good with our knowledge of it;
he thus paves the way for the doctrine which will absorb all
moral life in the rational function of thought. Reason has
never been set so high. At least that is what strikes us at first.
But let us look closer. Socrates teaches because the oracle of
Delphi has spoken. He has received a mission. He is poor, and

48 MORAL OBLIGATION CH.

poor he must remain. He must mix with the common folk,
he must become one of them, his speech must get back to
their speech. He will write nothing, so that his thought shall
be communicated, a living thing, to minds who shall convey
it to other minds. He is indifferent to cold and hunger, though
in no way an ascetic, only that he is delivered from material
needs, and emancipated from his body. A "daemon" accom-
panies him, which makes its voice heard when a warning is
necessary. He so thoroughly believes in this "daemonic
voice" that he dies rather than not follow it; if he refuses to
defend himself before the popular tribunal, if he goes to meet
his condemnation, it is because the "daemon" has said
nothing to dissuade him. In a word, his mission is of a religi-
ous and mystic order, in the present-day meaning of the
words; his teaching, so perfectly rational, hinges on some-
thing that seems to transcend pure reason. But do we not
detect this in his teaching itself? If the inspired, or at all
events lyrical sayings, which occur throughout the dialogues
of Plato, were not those of Socrates, but those of Plato
himself, if the master's language had always been such
as Xenophon attributes to him, could we understand the
enthusiasm which fired his disciples, and which has come
down the ages? Stoics, Epicureans, Cynics, all the Greek
moralists spring from Socrates not only, as has always been
said, because they develop the teaching of the Master in its
various directions, but also, and, above all, because they
borrow from him the attitude which is so little in keeping
with the Greek spirit and which he created, the attitude of
the Sage. Whenever the philosopher, closeted with his wis-
dom, stands apart from the common rule of mankind be
it to teach them, to serve as a model, or simply to go about
his work of perfecting his inner self Socrates is there, Soc-
rates alive, working through the incomparable prestige of his
person. Let us go further. It has been said that he brought
philosophy down from heaven to earth. But could we under-
stand his life, and above all his death, if the conception of the
soul which Plato attributes to him in the Phaedo had not been
his? More generally speaking, do the myths we find in the

i BETWEEN THE CLOSED AND THE OPEN 49

dialogues of Plato, touching the soul, its origin, its entrance
into the body, do anything more than set down in Platonic
terms a creative emotion, the emotion present in the moral
teaching of Socrates? The myths, and the Socratic conception
of the soul to which they stand in the same relationship as
the explanatory programme to a symphony, have been pre-
served along with the Platonic dialectics. They pursue their
subterranean way through Greek metaphysics, and rise to
the open air again with the Alexandrine philosophers, with
Ammonius perhaps, in any case with Plotinus, who claims to
be the successor of Socrates. They have provided the Soc-
ratic soul with a body of doctrine similar to that into which
was to be breathed the spirit of the Gospels. The two meta-
physics, in spite, perhaps because, of their resemblance, gave
battle to each other, before the one absorbed the best that
was in the other; for a while the world may well have won-
dered whether it was to become Christian or Neo-Platonic.
It was Socrates against Jesus. To confine ourselves to
Socrates, the question is what would this very practical
genius have done in another society and in other circum-
stances, if he had not been, above all, struck by the danger of
the moral empiricism of his time, and the mental anarchy of
Athenian democracy; if he had not had to deal with the most
crying need first, by establishing the rights of reason; if he
had not therefore thrust intuition and inspiration into the
background, and if the Greek he was had not mastered in him
the Oriental who sought to come into being? We have made
the distinction between the closed and the open: would
anyone place Socrates among the closed souls? There was
irony running through Socratic teaching, and outbursts of
lyricism were probably rare; but in the measure in which
these outbursts cleared the road for a new spirit, they have
been decisive for the future of humanity.

Between the closed soul and the open soul there is the soul
in process of opening. Between the immobility of a man seated
and the motion of the same man running there is the act of
getting up, the attitude he assumes when he rises. In a word,
between the static and the dynamic there is to be observed, in

50 MORAL OBLIGATION CH.

morality too, a transition stage. This intermediate state would
pass unnoticed if, when at rest, we could develop the neces-
sary impetus to spring straight into action. But it attracts our
attention when we stop short the usual sign of insufficient
impetus. Let us put the same thing in a different way. We
have seen that the purely static morality might be called
infra-intellectual, and the purely dynamic, supra-intellectual.
Nature intended the one, and the other is a contribution of
man's genius. The former is characteristic of a whole group
of habits which are, in man, the counterpart of certain
instincts in animals; it is something less than intelligence. The
latter is inspiration, intuition, emotion, susceptible of analysis
into ideas which furnish intellectual notations of it and
branch out into infinite detail; thus, like a unity which en-
compasses and transcends a plurality incapable of ever
equalling it, it contains any amount of intellectuality; it is
more than intelligence. Between the two lies intelligence
itself. It is at this point that the human soul would have
settled down, had it sprung forward from the one without
reaching the other. It would have dominated the morality of
the closed soul; it would not have attained to, or rather it
would not have created, that of the open soul. Its attitude, the
result of getting up, would have lifted it to the plane of in-
tellectuality. Compared with the position it had just left
described negatively such a soul would be manifesting in-
difference or insensibility, it would be in the "ataraxy" or the
"apathy" of the Epicureans and the Stoics. Considered in
what it positively is, if its detachment from the old sought to
be an attachment to something new, its life would be con-
templation; it would conform to the Platonic and the Aris-
totelian ideal. From whatever angle we look at it, its attitude
would be upright, noble, truly worthy of admiration and re-
served for the chosen few. Philosophies which start from very
different principles may find in it a common goal. The reason
is that there is only one road leading from action confined in
a circle to action developing in the freedom of space, from
repetition to creation, from the infra-intellectual to the supra-
intellectual. Any one halting between the two is inevitably in

i BETWEEN THE CLOSED AND THE OPEN 51

the zone of pure contemplation, and in any case, no longer
holding to the one but without having yet reached the other,
naturally practises that half-virtue, detachment.

We are speaking of pure intelligence, withdrawing into
itself and judging that the object of life is what the ancients
called "science" or contemplation. We are speaking, in a word,
of what mainly characterizes the morality of the Greek
Philosophers. But it would no longer be a matter of Greek
or Oriental philosophy, we should be dealing with the
morality of everybody if we considered intelligence as a mere
elaboration or co-ordinating agent of the material, some of it
infra-intellectual and some of it supra-intellectual, with
which we have been dealing in this chapter. In order to
define the very essence of duty, we have in fact distinguished
the two forces that act upon us, impulsion on the one hand,
and attraction on the other. This had to be done, and it is
because philosophy had left it undone, confining itself to
the intellectuality which to-day covers both, that it has
scarcely succeeded, so it would seem, in explaining how a
moral motive can have a hold upon the souls of men. But our
description was thereby condemned, as we hinted, to remain
a mere outline. That which is aspiration tends to materialize
by assuming the form of strict obligation. That which is strict
obligation tends to expand and to broaden out by absorbing
aspiration. Pressure and aspiration agree to meet for this
purpose in that region of the mind where concepts are
formed. The result is mental pictures, many of them of a
compound nature, being a blend of that which is a cause of
pressure and that which is an object of aspiration. But the
result is also that we lose sight of pure pressure and pure
aspiration actually at work on our wills; we see only the con-
cept into which the two distinct objects have amalgamated,
to which pressure and aspiration were respectively attached.
The force acting upon us is taken to be this concept: a fallacy
which accounts for the failure of strictly intellectualist systems
of morality, in other words, the majority of the philosophical
theories of duty. Not, of course, that an idea pure and simple
is without influence on our will. But this influence would

52 MORAL OBLIGATION CH.

only operate effectively if it could remain in isolation. It has
difficulty in resisting hostile influences, or, if it does triumph
over them, it is because of the reappearance, in their individ-
uality and their independence, exerting their full strength,
of the pressure and the aspiration which had each renounced
its own right of action by being represented together in
one idea.

We should have to open a very long parenthesis indeed if
we had to give their due share to the two forces, the one social,
the other supra-social, one of impulse, the other of attraction,
which impart to each moral motive its driving force. An
honest man will say, for example, that he acts from self-
respect, from a feeling of the dignity of man. Obviously he
would not express himself thus, if he did not begin by split-
ting himself into two selves, the personality he would be if
he simply let himself drift, and the one to which his will
uplifts him; the ego that respects is not the same as the ego
respected. What, then, is the latter? Wherein lies its dignity?
Whence comes the respect it inspires? Let us leave aside the
task of analysing this respect, in which we should find above
all an impulse of self-effacement, the attitude of the apprentice
towards the master, or rather, to use the language of Aristotle,
of the accident in the presence of the essence. There would
remain to be defined the higher ego to which the average
personality defers. There is no doubt that it is in the first
place the "social ego" within each of us, on which we have
already touched. If we posit, simply for the sake of theoretical
clearness, a "primitive" mentality, we shall see in it self-
respect coinciding with the feeling of so firm a solidarity
between the individual and the group that the group remains
present in the isolated individual, keeps an eye on him,
encourages or threatens him, demands, in a word, to be
consulted and obeyed; behind society itself there are super-
natural powers on which the group depends, and which make
the community responsible for the acts of the individual; the
pressure of the social ego is exerted with all these accumulated
forces. The individual, moreover, does not obey merely from
a habit of discipline or from fear of punishment; the group

i SELF-RESPECT 53

to which he belongs must, of course, exalt itself above the
others, if only to rouse his courage in battle, and the con-
sciousness of this superiority of strength secures for him
greater strength, together with all the satisfactions that pride
can give. If you want to make sure of this, take a state of mind
already more fully "evolved". Think of all the pride, also of
all the moral energy which went to make up the civis Romanus
sum: self-respect, in the Roman citizen, must have been
tantamount to what we call nationalism to-day. But we need
not turn to history or pre-history to see self-respect coinciding
with a group-pride. We need only observe what goes on
under our very eyes in the small sooifeties which form \Wthin
the big one, when men are drawn together by a distinguishing
badge which emphasizes a real or apparent superiority,
separating them from the common herd. To the self-respect
which every man, as a man, professes is then coupled an
additional respect, that of the ego which is no more than man
for an ego that stands out among men. All the members of
the group behave as a group, and thus a common code of
behaviour comes to be observed, a feeling of honour springs
up which is identical with esprit de corps. These are the first
components of self-respect. Looked at from this angle, a
point of view which we to-day can only isolate by an effort
of abstraction, it "binds" us by the prestige of the social
pressure it brings with it. Now indeed the impulsion would
obviously become attraction, if self-respect were the respect
for a person admired and venerated, whose image we bore
in our hearts and with whom we would aspire to become
identified, as the copy to an original. In reality it is not so,
for even if the word merely evokes the idea of an attitude of
self towards self, respect is, none the less, at the end of its
evolution as at the beginning, a social feeling. But the great
moral figures that have made their mark on history join hands
across the centuries, above our human cities; they unite into
a divine city which they bid us enter. We may not hear their
voices distinctly, the call has none the less gone forth, and
something answers from the depth of our soul; from the real
society in which we live we betake ourselves in thought to

54 MORAL OBLIGATION CH.

this ideal society; to this ideal society we bow down when we
reverence the dignity of man within us, when we declare
that we act from self-respect. It is true that the influence
exerted on us by definite persons tends to become impersonal.
And the impersonal character is still more stressed when a
philosopher explains to us that it is reason, present in each
of us, which constitutes the dignity of man. But here we
must take care to know what we mean. That reason is the
distinguishing mark of man no one will deny. That it is a
thing of superior value, in the sense in which a fine work of
art is indeed valuable, will also be granted. But we must
explain how it is that its orders are absolute and why they
are obeyed. Reason can only put forward reasons, which we
are apparently always at liberty to counter with other reasons.
Let us not then merely assert that reason, present in each of
us, compels our respect and commands our obedience by
virtue of its paramount value. We must add that there are,
behind reason, the men who have made mankind divine,
and who have thus stamped a divine character on reason,
which is the essential attribute of man. It is these men who
draw us towards an ideal society, while we yield to the pressure
of the real one.

All moral ideas interpenetrate each other, but none is more
instructive than that of justice, in the first place, because it
includes most of the others, and next, because it is expressed,
in spite of its extraordinary richness, in simpler formulae;
lastly and above all, because here the two forms of obligation
are seen to dovetail into each other. Justice has always evoked
ideas of equality, of proportion, of compensation. Pensare,
from which we derive " compensation" and " recompense",
means to weigh. Justice is represented as holding the scales.
Equity signifies equality. Rules and regulation, right and
righteousness are words which suggest a straight line. These
references to arithmetic and geometry are characteristic of
justice throughout its history. The idea must have already
taken shape as far back as the days of exchange and barter;
however rudimentary a community may be, it barters, and it
cannot barter without first finding out if the objects exchanged

i JUSTICE 55

are really equal in value, that is to say, both exchangeable for
a definite third object. Let this equality of value be set up as
a rule, this rule be given a place among the customs of the
group, the "totality of obligation", as we called it, adding its
weight to the rule: here we have justice already, in a clearly
defined shape, with its imperative character, and the ideas of
equality and reciprocity involved. But such justice will not
only apply to the exchange of objects. It will extend gradually
to intercourse between persons, though unable, for a long
time to come, to shake off all idea of objects and exchanges. It
will then consist mainly in the regulation of natural impulses
by the introduction of the idea of a no less natural reciprocity,
for example, the expectation of an injury equivalent to the
injury done. In primitive societies, assaults on persons con-
cern the community only exceptionally, when the act is likely
to injure the community itself by bringing down upon it the
wrath of the gods. The injured party or his family has only
therefore to obey his instinct, react naturally, and avenge
himself; and the reprisals might be out of all proportion to
the offence, if this requital of evil for evil was not, to all
appearances, vaguely subject to the general law of exchanges
and barter. It is true that the quarrel might go on for ever,
the "vendetta" might be kept up indefinitely by the two
families, if one of them did not make up its mind to accept
"damages" in cash; here the idea of compensation, already
implied in the idea of exchange and barter, will clearly emerge.
Now let the community itself undertake to exact punishment,
to repress all acts of violence whatsoever, and it will be said
that the community is dispensing justice, if the rule to which
individuals and families referred for a settlement of their dis-
putes were already being described by that term. Moreover,
the community will assess the penalty according to the gravity
of the offence, since otherwise there would be no object in
stopping, once we have begun to do wrong; we should not
run any greater risk by proceeding to extremities. An eye
for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, the injury received must always
be equivalent to the injury inflicted. But is the price of an
eye always an eye, the price of a tooth always a tooth? Quality

56 MORAL OBLIGATION CH.

must be borne in mind as well as quantity. The law of retalia-
tion is applied only within a class; the same injury sustained,
the same offence received, will call for greater compensation,
or heavier punishmejnt, if the victim belong to a higher class.
In a word, equality may connote a ratio and become a pro-
portion. Hence, though justice may embrace a greater and
greater variety of things, it is always defined in the same way.
Nor will its formula alter when, in a more civilized state, it
extends to the relations between the rulers and the ruled, and
in a more general way to those between different social cate-
gories; into a state of things which only exists de facto it will
introduce considerations of equality or proportion which will
make of that state something mathematically defined, and,
thereby, it would seem, pointed de jure. There is indeed no
doubt that force lies at the origin of the division of ancient
societies into classes subordinate to one another. But a subor-
dination that is habitual ends by seeming natural, and by seek-
ing for itself an explanation; if the inferior class has accepted
its position for a considerable time, it may go on doing so when
it has virtually become the stronger, because it will attribute
to the governing class a superior value. And this superiority
will be real, if the members of this class have taken advantage
of the facilities they may have had for intellectual and moral
improvement; but it may quite as well be a mere carefully-
fostered appearance of superiority. However it may be,
whether real or apparent, this superiority only needs to persist
in order to seem a matter of birth; since hereditary privilege is
there, there must be, people say to one another, some innate
superiority. Nature, who intended ordered societies, has pre-
disposed man to this illusion. Plato shared it in his Ideal
Republic. If a class system is understood in this way, re-
sponsibilities and privileges are looked upon as a common
stock, to be eventually distributed among the individuals
according to their worth, consequently according to the ser-
vices they render. Justice here still holds her scales, measuring
and proportioning. Now, from this justice, which, though it
may not express itself in utilitarian terms, is none the less
faithful to its mercantile origins, how shall we pass to the

i JUSTICE 57

justice which implies neither exchange made nor service
rendered, being the assertion pure and simple of the invio-
lability of right and of the incommensurability of the person
with any values whatever? Before answering this question,
let us pause to admire the magic property of speech, I mean
the power which a word bestows on a newly created idea
when it extends to that idea after having been applied to a
pre-existent object of modifying that object and thus retro-
actively influencing the past. In whatever light we view the
transition from relative to absolute justice, whether it took
place by stages or all at once, there has been creation. Some-
thing has supervened which might never have existed, which
would not have existed except for certain circumstances,
certain men, perhaps one particular man. But instead of
realizing that some new thing has come and taken possession
of the old and absorbed it into a whole that was up to then
unforeseeable, we prefer looking upon the process as if the
new thing had always been there, not actually but virtually
pre-existing, and as if the old had been a part of it even then,
a part of something yet uncreated; and on this showing
the conceptions of justice which followed one another in
ancient societies were no more than partial, incomplete
visions of an integral justice which is nothing more or less
than justice as we know it to-day. There is no need to analyse
in detail this particular example of a very general illusion,
barely noticed by philosophers, which has vitiated a goodly
number of metaphysical doctrines and which sets the theory
of knowledge insoluble problems. Let us simply say that it is
part of our habit of considering all forward movement as a pro-
gressive shortening of the distance between the starting-point
(which indeed exists) and the goal, which only comes into
being as a stopping-place when the moving object has chosen
to stop there. It does not follow that, because it can always
be interpreted in this sense when it has attained its end, the
movement consisted in a progression towards this end: an
interval which has still but one extremity cannot diminish
little by little, since it is not yet an interval: it will have
diminished little by little when the moving object has created,

5 8 MORAL OBLIGATION CH.

by its actual or virtual stopping, a second extremity, and
when we consider it in retrospect or even simply trace the
movement in its progress while, in anticipation, reconstitut-
ing it in that way, backwards. But this is just what we do not
realize for the most part; we introduce into the things them-
selves, under the guise of the pre-existence of the possible
in the real, this retrospective anticipation. This illusion
lies at the root of many a philosophical problem; Zeno's
Dichotomy has provided the typical example. And it is this
same illusion which we find in ethics when the continually
expanding forms of relative justice are defined as growing
approximations of absolute justice. The most we are entitled
to say is that once the latter is stated, the former might be
regarded as so many halts along a road which, plotted out ret-
rospectively by us, would lead to absolute justice. And even
then we should have to add that there had been, not gradual
progress, but at a certain epoch a sudden leap. It would be
interesting to determine the exact point at which this saltus
took place. And it would be no less instructive to find out how
it was that, once conceived (in a vague form), absolute justice
long remained no more than a respected ideal, without there
being any question of translating it into practice. Let us
simply say, in so far as the first point is concerned, that the
long-standing inequalities of class, doubtless imposed in the
beginning by force, and accepted afterwards as inequalities
of merit and services rendered, become more and more ex-
posed to the criticism of the lower classes; the ruling elements
are, moreover, deteriorating, because, being too sure of them-
selves, they are guilty of a slackening of that inner tension
upon which they had called for a greater effort of intelligence
and will, and which had consolidated their supremacy. They
could indeed maintain their position if they held together;
but because of their very tendency to assert their individuality,
there will one day arise ambitious men from among them who
mean to get the upper hand and who will seek support in the
lower class, especially if the latter already has some share in
affairs; and that day shatters the belief in a native superiority
of the upper class, the spell is broken. Thus do aristocracies

I JUSTICE 59

tend to merge into democracy, simply because political in-
equality is an unstable thing, as, indeed, political equality,
once it is established, will be, if it is only de facto, if therefore
it admits of exceptions, if, for example, it tolerates slavery
within the city. But it is a far cry from such examples of
equilibrium, arrived at mechanically and always transitory,
like that of the scales held by the justice of yore, to a justice
such as ours, the justice of the "rights of man", which no
longer evokes ideas of relativity and proportion, but, on the
contrary, of the incommensurable and the absolute. Of this
justice we could only form a complete idea if we were to
"draw it out to infinity", as the mathematicians say; it is only
formulated precisely and categorically at a stated time, by
prohibitions; but on its positive side it proceeds by successive
creations, each of them being a fuller realization than the last
of personality and consequently of humanity. Such realiza-
tion is only possible through the medium of laws; it implies
the assent of society. It would, moreover, be futile to maintain
that it takes place gradually and automatically, as a consequence
of the state of mind of society at a given period of its history.
It is a leap forward, which can only take place if society has
decided to try the experiment; and the experiment will not
be tried unless society has allowed itself to be won over, or at
least stirred. Now the first start has always been given by
someone. It is no use maintaining that this leap forward does
not imply a creative effort behind it, and that we have not to
do here with an invention comparable with that of the artist.
That would be to forget that most great reforms appeared at
first sight impracticable, as in fact they were. They could only
be carried out in a society whose state of mind was already
such as their realization was bound to bring about; and you
had a circle from which there would have been no escape,
if one or several privileged beings, having expanded the social
ego within themselves, had not broken the circle and drawn
the society after them. Now this is exactly what occurs in the
miracle of artistic creation. A work of genius which is at first
disconcerting may create, little by little, by the simple fact of
its presence, a conception of art and an artistic atmosphere

60 MORAL OBLIGATION CH.

which bring it within our comprehension; it will then become
in retrospect a work of genius; otherwise it would have
remained what it was at the beginning, merely disconcerting.
In a financial speculation, it is the success that causes the idea
to have been a good one. Something much the same occurs
in artistic creation, with this difference, that the success, if
the work which at first repelled us eventually wins through,
is due to a transformation of public taste brought about by
the work itself, the latter being then force as well as matter;
it has set up an impetus imparted to it by the artist, or rather
one which is the very impetus of the artist, invisible and
present within the work. The same can be said of moral
invention, and more particularly of the creations which more
and more enrich, one after the other, the idea of justice. They
bear, above all, upon the substance of justice, but they
modify its form as well. To take the latter first, let us lay
down that justice has always appeared as obligatory, but that
for a long time it was an obligation like other obligations. It
met, like the others, a social need; and it was the pressure of
society on the individual which made justice obligatory. This
being so, an injustice was neither more nor less shocking than
any other breach of the rules. There was no justice for slaves,
save perhaps a relative, almost an optional justice. Public
safety was not merely the supreme law, as indeed it has
remained, it was furthermore proclaimed as such; whereas
to-day we should not dare to lay down the principle that it
justifies injustice, even if we accept any particular consequence
of that principle. Let us dwell on this point, put to ourselves
the famous question: "What should we do if we heard that
for the common good, for the very existence of mankind,
there was somewhere a man, an innocent man, condemned
to suffer eternal torment?" Well, we should perhaps agree
to it on the understanding that some magic philtre is going
to make us forget it, that we shall never hear anything more
about it; but if we were bound to know it, to think of it, to
realize that this man's hideous torture was the price of our
existence, that it was even the fundamental condition of exist-
ence in general, no! a thousand times no! Better to accept

i JUSTICE 61

that nothing should exist at all! Better let our planet be blown
to pieces. Now what has happened? How has justice emerged
from social life, within which it had always dwelt with no
particular privilege, and soared above it, categorical and
transcendent? Let us recall the tone and accents of the
Prophets of Israel. It is their voice we hear when a great
injustice has been done and condoned. From the depths of
the centuries they raise their protest. True, justice has
singularly expanded since their time. The justice they
preached applied above all to Israel, their indignation against
injustice was the very wrath of Jehovah against His dis-
obedient people, or against the enemies of this chosen people.
If any of them, like Isaiah, may have thought of universal
justice, it was because Israel, the chosen of God among the
other peoples, bound to God by a covenant, was so high above
the rest of mankind that sooner or later it was destined to be
taken as a model. None the less, they imparted to justice the
violently imperative character which it has kept, which it has
since stamped on a substance grown infinitely more extensive.
But these extensions did not occur spontaneously either.
On each one of them a competent historian could put a
proper name. Each development was a creation, and indeed
the door will ever stand open to fresh creations. The progress
which was decisive for the substance of justice, as the era of
the prophets had been for its form, consisted in the substitu-
tion of a universal republic, embracing all men, for that
republic which went no further than the gates of the city, and,
within the city, was limited to free men. It is from this that
all the rest has followed, for, if the door has remained open to
new creations, and probably will for all time stand open, yet
it must have been opened. There seems to be no doubt that
this second advance, the passage from the closed to the open,
is due to Christianity, as the first was due to the Prophets of
Judaism. Could it have been brought about by mere phil-
osophy? There is nothing more instructive than to see how
the philosophers have skirted round it, touched it, and yet
missed it. Let us leave out Plato, who certainly includes the
Idea of man among the transcendent Ideas: did it not follow

62 MORAL OBLIGATION CH.

that all men were of the same essence? From this to the idea
that all men, qua men, were of equal worth and that the
common essence conferred on them the same fundamental
rights, was but one step. But the step was not taken. It would
have meant condemning slavery, giving up the Greek idea
that foreigners, being barbarians, could claim no rights. Was
it, in fact, an essentially Greek idea? We find it, implied in
others, wherever Christianity has not penetrated, in modern
as well as in ancient times. In China, for example, there have
arisen very noble doctrines, but they have not been concerned
with laying down laws for humanity; though they do not
expressly say so, they are in fact only interested in the Chinese
community. Indeed, before Christianity, we find Stoicism
and, among the Stoics, philosophers who proclaim that all men
are brothers, and that the wise man is a citizen of the world.
But these dicta were the expression of an ideal, an ideal
merely conceived, and very likely conceived as impracticable.
There is nothing to show that any of the great Stoics, not
even the Stoic who was an emperor, considered the possibility
of lowering the barrier between the free man and the slave,
between the Roman citizen and the barbarian. Humanity had
to wait till Christianity for the idea of universal brotherhood,
with its implication of equality of rights and the sanctity of
the person, to become operative. Some may say that it has been
rather a slow process; indeed eighteen centuries elapsed before
the rights of man were proclaimed by the Puritans of America,
soon followed by the men of the French Revolution. It began,
nevertheless, with the teachings of the Gospels, and was
destined to go on indefinitely; it is one thing for an idea to be
merely propounded by sages worthy of admiration, it is very
different when the idea is broadcast to the ends of the earth
in a message overflowing with love, invoking love in return.
Indeed there was no question here of clear-cut wisdom, re-
ducible, from beginning to end, into maxims. There was rather
a pointing of the way, a suggestion of the means; at most an
indication of the goal, which would only be temporary, de-
manding a constant renewal of effort. Such effort was bound
to be, in certain individuals at least, an effort of creation. The

i JUSTICE 63

method consisted in supposing possible what is actually im-
possible in a given society, in imagining what would be its
effect on the soul of society, and then inducing some such
psychic condition by propaganda and example: the effect, once
obtained, would retrospectively complete its cause; new feel-
ings, evanescent indeed, would call forth the new legislation
seemingly indispensable to their appearance, and which would
then serve to consolidate them. The modern idea of justice
has progressed in this way by a series of individual creations
which have succeeded through multifarious efforts animated
by one and the same impulse. Classical antiquity had known
nothing of propaganda; its justice had the unruffled serenity
of the gods upon Olympus. Spiritual expansion, missionary
zeal, impetus, movement, all these are of Judaic-Christian
origin. But because men went on using the same word, they
too readily thought they were dealing with the same thing.
We cannot too often repeat that successive creations, in-
dividual and contingent, will be generally grouped under the
same heading, classified under the same idea and labelled by
the same name, if each one has given rise to the one that
follows it and if they appear, in retrospect, as continuations of
one another. Let us go further. The name will not apply only
to the terms already existing of the series thus obtained.
Encroaching on the future, it will denote the whole series, and
it will be placed at the end, nay, be drawn out to infinity; as the
designation was created long ago, we shall imagine the idea
which it represents as having been also created just as long
ago, and indeed existing since the beginning of time, though
still open to additions and of undetermined content; thus each
advance is imagined to be so much gained over an entity
conceived as pre-existing; reality is looked upon as eating its
way into the ideal, incorporating into itself, bit by bit, the
totality of eternal justice. Now that is true not only of the idea
of justice but also of the ideas which are cognate with it
equality and liberty, for example. We are fond of defining the
progress of justice as a forward movement towards liberty and
equality. The definition is unimpeachable, but what are we to
derive from it? It applies to the past; it can seldom guide our

64 MORAL OBLIGATION CH.

choice for the future. Take liberty, for instance. It is com-
monly said that the individual is entitled to any liberty that
does not infringe the liberty of others. But the granting of
a new liberty, which, might lead to an encroachment of all
the different liberties on one another in present-day society,
might produce the opposite effect in a society where feeling
and custom had been modified by that very reform. So that it
is often impossible to state a priori the exact degree of liberty
which can be allotted to the individual without injury to
the liberty of his fellow-men; change the quantity, and the
quality is no longer the same. On the other hand, equality
can hardly be obtained, save at the expense of liberty, so that
we should first ask ourselves which of the two is preferable
to the other. But the question admits of no general answer;
for the sacrifice of this or that liberty, if it is fully agreed upon
by the citizens as a whole, partakes still of liberty; and above
all, the liberty which is left may be superior in quality if the
reform, tending towards greater equality, has led to a society
where men breathe more freely, where greater joy is found in
action. Look at it how you will, you must always come back
to the conception of moral creators who see in their mind's
eye a new social atmosphere, an environment in which life
would be more worth living, I mean a society such that, if
men once tried it, they would refuse to go back to the old
state of things. Thus only is moral progress to be defined;
but it is only in retrospect that it can be defined, when some
exceptional moral nature has created a new feeling, like a new
kind of music, and passed it on to mankind, stamping it with
his own vitality. Think in this way of "liberty", of "equality",
of "the sanctity of the individual", and you will see that you
have here no mere difference of degree, but a radical differ-
ence of nature between the two ideas of justice which we have
distinguished, the one closed, the other open. For relatively
stable justice, closed justice, which expresses the automatic
equilibrium of a society fresh from the hands of nature,
manifests itself in customs to which the totality of obligation
is attached, and this totality of obligation ends by incorpor-
ating, as public opinion progressively accepts them, the

i PRESSURE AND ASPIRATION 65

decrees of the other justice, the justice which is open to suc-
cessive creations. Thus the two substances, the one supplied
by society, the other a product of man's genius, come to be cast
in the same mould. Indeed, in practice, they may well be
indistinguishable. But the philosopher must discriminate the
one from the other; if not, he is sure to misunderstand the
nature of social evolution as well as the origin of duty. Social
evolution is not the evolution of a society which has devel-
oped according to a method destined to transform it later.
Between the development and the transformation there is
here neither analogy nor common measure. Because closed
justice and open justice are incorporated in equally peremptory
laws, expressing themselves in the same way, and outwardly
similar, it does not follow that they must be explained in the
same fashion. No example can bring out better than this the
twofold origin of morality and the two elements of obligation.
There can be no question that, in the present state of
things, reason must appear the sole imperative, that it is
to the interest of humanity to attribute an intrinsic force,
an authority of their own to moral concepts, in a word that
moral activity in a civilized society is essentially rational.
How else could we tell what to do in each particular case?
There are deep underlying forces here, one of impulsion, the
other of attraction; we cannot refer directly to them each time
we have to make a decision. To do so would, in most cases,
simply amount to doing needlessly over again something
which society, on the one hand, and the highest representa-
tives of humanity on the other, have done for us. Their work
has resulted in certain rules being laid down and an ideal
being set up as a pattern: to live morally will mean to follow
these rules, to conform to this ideal. In this way alone can
we be sure of remaining in complete accord with ourselves:
the rational alone is self-consistent. Only in this way can we
compare various lines of conduct with one another; only in
this way can we estimate their moral value. The thing is so
obvious that we have barely hinted at it, we have nearly
always taken it for granted. But the result was that our
statement remained a mere diagram and might well appear

66 MORAL OBLIGATION CH.

inadequate. Indeed, on the intellectual plane, all the precepts
of morality interpenetrate one another in concepts of which
each one, like Leibnitz's monad, is more or less representa-
tive of all the others. Above or below this plane, we find
forces which, taken singly, correspond only to a part of what
has been projected on the intellectual plane. Since this draw-
back to the method we have adopted is undeniable, and indeed
inevitable, since we perceive that we must use this method
and since we feel that it cannot fail to raise objections through-
out its application, we think it important, in conclusion, to
dwell on it once more, define it yet again, even if we are once
more obliged to repeat at certain points, and almost in the
same terms, what we have already had occasion to say.

A human society with its members linked together like
the cells of an organism, or, what amounts almost to the
same thing, like ants in an ant-hill, has never existed, but
the groupings of primitive humanity were certainly nearer
the ants than ours are to-day. Nature, in making man a social
animal, intended that this solidarity should be very close,
while relaxing it sufficiently to enable the individual to display,
in the interests of society itself, the intelligence with which
she has provided him. We went no further than this conten-
tion, in the first part of our argument. As such, it would be of
slight importance for any moral philosophy that accepted
without question the belief in the heredity of acquired char-
acters. Man might in that case be born to-day with very
different tendencies from those of his remotest ancestors.
But we rely upon experience, which teaches that the hereditary
transmission of a contracted habit, assuming that it ever
happens, is an exceptional and not a regular or frequent occur-
rence, sufficient in the long run to bring about a far-reaching
alteration in the nature of man. However radical the differ-
ence may be between primitive man and civilized man, it is
due almost solely to what the child has amassed since the
first awakening of its consciousness; all the acquisitions of
humanity during centuries of civilization are there, at his
elbow, deposited in the knowledge imparted to him , in the tradi-
tions, the institutions, the customs, the syntax and vocabulary

i PRESSURE AND ASPIRATION 67

of the language he learns to speak, and even in the gestures of
the people about him. It is this thick humus which covers
to-day the bed-rock of original nature. It may indeed repre-
sent the slowly accumulated effects of an infinite variety of
causes; it has, nevertheless, had to follow the general con-
figuration of the soil on which it is deposited. In short, the
obligation we find in the depths of our consciousness and
which, as the etymology of the word implies, binds us to the
other members of society, is a link of the same nature as that
which unites the ants in the ant-hill or the cells of an organ-
ism; it would take this form in the eyes of an ant, were she to
become endowed with man's intelligence, or of an organic
cell, were it to become as independent in its movements as an
intelligent ant. I refer here of course to obligation taken in
this simple form, devoid of matter: it is the irreducible, the
ever-present element, even now, in our nature. It goes with-
out saying that the matter wrought into this form becomes
more and more intellectual and self-consistent as civilization
progresses, and new matter accrues incessantly, not inevitably
at the direct bidding of this form, but under the logical
pressure of the intellectual matter already introduced into it.
And we have seen also how a certain kind of matter which is
intended to be run into a different mould, whose introduction
is not due, even indirectly, to the need for social preservation,
but to an aspiration of individual consciousness, adopts this
form by settling down, like the rest of morality, on the intellec-
tual plane. But every time we come back to the strictly impera-
tive element in obligation, and even supposing we found in it
everything intelligence had put there to enrich it, everything
with which reason has hedged it round to justify it, we find
ourselves once again confronted by this fundamental frame-
work. So much for pure obligation.

Now, a mystic society, embracing all humanity and moving,
animated by a common will, towards the continually renewed
creation of a more complete humanity, is no more possible
of realization in the future than was the existence in the past
of human societies functioning automatically and similar to
lanimal societies. Pure aspiration is an ideal limit, just like

68 MORAL OBLIGATION CH.

obligation unadorned. It is none the less true that it is the
mystic souls who draw and will continue to draw civilized
societies in their wake. The remembrance of what they have
been, of what they h'ave done, is enshrined in the memory of
humanity. Each one of us can revive it, especially if he brings
it in touch with the image, which abides ever living within
him, of a particular person who shared in that mystic state
and radiated around him some of its light. If we do not evoke
this or that sublime figure, we know that we can do so; he
thus exerts on us a virtual attraction. Even if we ignore
individuals, there remains the general formula of morality
accepted to-day by civilized humanity: this formula includes
two things, a system of orders dictated by impersonal social
requirements, and a series of appeals made to the conscience
of each of us by persons who represent the best there is
in humanity. The obligation relating to the orders is, in its
original and fundamental elements, sub-rational. The potency
of the appeal lies in the strength of the emotion it has aroused
in times gone by, which it arouses still, or can arouse: this
emotion, if only because it can indefinitely be resolved into
ideas, is more than idea; it is supra-rational. The two forces,
working in different regions of the soul, are projected on to
the intermediary plane, which is that of intelligence. They will
henceforth be represented by their projections. These inter-
mingle and interpenetrate. The result is a transposition of
orders and appeals into terms of pure reason. Justice thus
finds itself continually broadened by pity; " charity" assumes
more and more the shape of justice; the elements of morality
become homogeneous, comparable, and almost commen-
surable with one another; moral problems are clearly
enunciated and methodically solved. Humanity is asked to
place itself at a certain level, higher than that of animal society,
where obligation would be but the force of instinct, but not
so high as an assembly of gods, where everything would
partake of the creative impetus. Considering then the mani-
festations of moral life thus organized, we shall find them
perfectly self-consistent, capable therefore of being referred
to first principles. Moral life will be rational life.

i INTELLECTUALISM 69

Everybody will agree on this point. But because we have
established the rational character of moral conduct, it does
not follow that morality has its origin or even its foundation
in pure reason. The important question is to find out why
we are "obliged" in cases where following our inclination
by no means suffices to ensure that our duty is done.

That in that case it is reason speaking, I am willing to
admit; but, if it spoke only in its own name, if it did anything
more than rationally express the action of certain forces
which dwell behind it, how could it struggle against passion
and self-interest? The philosopher who considers that reason
is self-sufficient and claims to demonstrate this, only succeeds
in his demonstration if he tacitly reintroduces these forces;
in fact they have crept back themselves, unbeknown to him,
surreptitiously. Just examine the demonstration. It takes two
forms, according as it assumes reason to be void or grants it
a content of matter, according as it sees in moral obligation
the necessity, pure and simple, of remaining logically in
agreement with itself, or an invitation logically to pursue a
certain end. Let us take these two forms in turn. When Kant
tells us that a deposit of money must be handed back because,
if the recipient appropriated it, it would no longer be a
deposit, he is obviously juggling with words. Either by
"deposit" he means the material fact of placing a sum of
money in the hands (say) of a friend, with an intimation that
it will be called for later. But this material fact alone, with
this intimation alone, would have no other effect than that
of 'impelling the holder to give back the sum if he has no
need of it, or simply to appropriate it if he is short of money;
both proceedings are equally consistent, equally logical, so
long as the word deposit evokes only a material image un-
accompanied by moral conceptions. Or else moral considera-
tions are involved, there is the idea that the deposit has been
"entrusted" and that a trust "must not" be betrayed; the
idea that the holder has pledged himself, that he has "given
his word"; the idea that, even if he has said nothing, he is
bound by a tacit "contract"; the idea that there exists a "right
of property" etc. Then indeed it would be self-contradictory

70 MORAL OBLIGATION CH.

to accept a deposit and refuse to give it back; the deposit
would no longer be a deposit; the philosopher might say
that the breach of morality in this case pertains to the
irrational. But it would be because the word "deposit" was
taken in the sense that it has in a human group possessing
fully developed moral ideas, conventions and obligations; the
moral obligation would no longer amount to the bare and
empty necessity of not contradicting oneself, since the contra-
diction in this case would simply consist in rejecting, after
having accepted it, a moral obligation which for this very
reason was already there. But enough of these quibbles. It is
quite natural that we should meet with a pretension to found
morality on a respect for logic among philosophers and
scholars, who are accustomed to bow to logic in speculative
matters, and are thus inclined to believe that in all matters,
and for the whole of humanity, logic must be accepted as
the sovereign authority. But because science must respect
the logic of things and logic in general if it wants to succeed
in its researches, because such is the interest of the scientist
as a scientist, it is not to be concluded that we are obliged
always to conform to logic in our conduct, as though such
were the interest of man in general, or even the interest of the
t scientist as man. Our admiration for the speculative function
jof the mind may be great; but when philosophers maintain
that it should be sufficient to silence selfishness and passion,
they prove to us and this is a matter for congratulation
that they have never heard the voice of the one or the other
very loud within themselves. So much for a morality claiming
as its basis reason in the guise of pure form, without matter.
Before considering the morality which adds matter to this
form, we must note that people often get no further than
the first when they think they have reached the second. That
is the case with those philosophers who explain moral
obligation by the fact that the idea of the Good forces itself
upon us. If they take this idea from organized society, where
human actions are already classified according as they are
more or less appropriate for maintaining social cohesion and
furthering the progress of humanity, and, above all, where

i INTELLECTUALISM 71

certain clearly defined forces produce this cohesion and
bring about this progress, they can doubtless say that an
activity is more moral, the more it conforms to the Good;
and they might also add that the Good is conceived as claim-
ing obedience. But this is because the Good would be merely
the heading under which men agree to classify the actions
which present one or the other feature and to which they feel
themselves prompted by the forces of impulse and attraction
which we have defined. The notion of a graduated scale of
these various lines of conduct, and therefore of their re-
spective values, and, on the other hand, the all but inevitable
necessity which forces them upon us, must then have existed
before the idea of Good, which appeared later simply to
provide a label or name; this idea, left to itself, would have
lent no assistance to their classification, and still less to their
enforcement. But if, on the contrary, it is maintained that
the idea of the Good is at the source of all obligation and all
aspiration, and that it should also serve to evaluate human
actions, we must be told by what sign we shall recognize
that a given line of conduct is in conformity with it; we must
therefore be furnished with a definition of the Good; and
we fail to see how it can be defined without assuming a
hierarchy of creatures, or at the very least, of actions, of
varying elevation: but if the hierarchy exists by itself, there
is no need to call upon the idea of the Good to establish it;
besides, we do not see why this hierarchy ought to be main-
tained, why we should be bound to respect it; you can only
invoke in its favour aesthetic reasons, allege that a certain
line of conduct is "finer" than another, that it sets us more
or less high up in the ranks of living beings: but what could
you reply to the man who declared that he places his own
interest before all other considerations? Looking more closely,
one would see that this morality has never been self-sufficient.
It has simply been added on, as an artistic make-weight, to
obligations which existed before it, and rendered it possible.
When Greek philosophers attributed a pre-eminent dignity
to the pure idea of Good, and, more generally, to a life of
contemplation, they were speaking for a chosen few, a small

72 MORAL OBLIGATION CH.

group formed within society, which would begin by taking
social life for granted. It has been said that this morality
was silent about duty and knew nothing of obligation as we
understand it. True, it was silent about it; but that was
precisely because it assumed obligation to be self-evident.
The philosopher was supposed to have begun by doing his
duty like anybody else, as demanded of him by the city.
Only then did a morality supervene, destined to make his
life more beautiful by treating it as a work of art. In a word,
and to sum up the discussion, there can be no question of
founding morality on the cult of reason. It remains to be
seen, as we have said, whether it could be founded on reason
in so far as reason might supply our activity with a definite
object, in conformity with reason, but supplementary to it,
an object towards which reason would teach us to strive
systematically. But it is easy to see that no objective not
even the twofold one we have indicated, not even the dual
preoccupation of maintaining social cohesion and of further-
ing the progress of humanity will impose itself peremptorily
as a mere rational proposition. If certain really active forces,
actually influencing our will, are already in possession, reason
could and should intervene to co-ordinate their effects, but
it could not contend with them, since one can always reason
with reason, confront its arguments with others, or simply
refuse all discussion and reply by a "sic volo, sic jubeo". In
truth, a system of ethics which imagines it is founding obli-
gation on purely rational considerations, unwittingly re-
introduces, as we have pointed out already and as we shall
point out again, forces of a different order. That is exactly
why it succeeds so easily. Real obligation is already there,
and whatever reason impresses upon it assumes naturally an
obligatory character. Society, with all that holds it together
and drives it forward, is already there, and that is why reason
can adopt as a principle of morality one or the other of the
ends towards which social man is striving; by building up
a thoroughly consistent system of means destined to attain
this end, reason will more or less rediscover morality, such
as common sense conceives it, such as humanity in general

i INTELLECTUALISM 73

practises, or claims to practise it. For each of these objectives,
culled by reason from society, has been socialized and, by
that very fact, impregnated with all the other aims to be
found there. Thus, even if we set up personal interest as the
moral principle, we shall find no great difficulty in building
up a rational morality sufficiently resembling current morality,
as is proved by the relative success of utilitarian ethics.
Selfishness, indeed, for the man living among his fellow-men,
comprises legitimate pride, the craving for praise, etc., with
the result that purely personal interest has become impossible
to define, so large is the element of public interest it contains,
so hard is it to keep them separate. Think of the amount of
deference for others included in what we call self-love, and
even in jealousy and envy! Anyone wanting to practise
absolute egoism would have to shut himself up within him-
self, and not care enough for his neighbour to be jealous or
envious of him. There is a touch of sympathy in these forms
of hate, and the very vices of a man living among his fellows
are not without certain implications of virtue; all are saturated
with vanity, and vanity means sociability. Still easier will it
be, then, to draw all moral maxims, or nearly all, from feelings
such as honour, or sympathy, or pity. Each of these tend-
encies, in a man living in society, is laden with all that social
morality has deposited in it; and we should have to unload
it first, at the risk of reducing it to very little indeed, if we
wished to avoid begging the question in using it to explain
morality. The ease with which theories of this kind are
built up should make us suspicious: if the most varied aims
can thus be transmuted by philosophers into moral aims,
we may surmise, seeing that they have not yet found the
philosopher's stone, that they had started by putting gold in
the bottom of their crucible. Similarly it is obvious that none
of these doctrines will account for obligation. For we may
be obliged to adopt certain means in order to attain such
and such ends; but if we choose to renounce the end, how
can the means be forced upon us? And yet, by adopting any
one of these ends as the principle of morality, philosophers
have evolved from it whole systems of maxims, which, without

74 MORAL OBLIGATION CH.

going so far as to assume an imperative form, come near
enough to it to afford satisfaction. The reason is quite simple.
They have considered the pursuit of these ends, we repeat,
in a society in which there are peremptory pressures, together
with aspirations to match them and also to extend them.
Pressure and attraction, specifying their objectives, would lead
to any one of these systems of maxims, since each of them
aims at the attainment of an end both individual and social.
Each of these systems then already exists in the social
atmosphere when the philosopher arrives on the scene; it
comprises maxims which are near enough in substance to
those which the philosopher will formulate, the former being
1 obligatory. Rediscovered by philosophy, but no longer in the
form of a command since they are now mere suggestions for
the intelligent pursuit of an end, such as intelligence might
easily repudiate, they are snapped up by the vaguer or per-
haps merely virtual maxims which resemble them, but which
are laden with obligation. They thus become obligatory, but
the obligation has not come down, as might be imagined,
from above, that is to say, from a principle from which the
maxims have been rationally deduced; it has come up from
below, I mean from that substratum of pressure, capable of
being extended into aspiration, which is the basis of society.
In a word, the moral theorists take society for granted and
consequently also the two forces to which society owes its
stability and its mobility. Taking advantage of the fact that
all social ends interpenetrate one another, and that each of
them, resting as it were on that stability and mobility, seems
to be invested with these two forces, they have no difficulty
in reconstituting the content of morals with one or other
of the ends assumed as a principle, and then showing that
such morality is obligatory. For, by taking society for granted,
they have also taken for granted the matter of this morality
and its form, all it contains and all the obligation with which
it is clothed.

If we now delve down beneath that illusion which is
common to all theoretical moral systems, this is what we
should find. Obligation is a necessity with which one can

i INTELLECTUALISM 75

argue, and which is therefore companioned by intelligence
and liberty. This necessity is, in fact, similar to that which
accompanies the production of a physiological or even a
physical effect; in a humanity which nature had made devoid
of intelligence, where the individual had no power to choose,
the action destined to maintain the preservation and cohesion
of the group would be accomplished inevitably; it would be
accomplished under the influence of a definite force, the same
that makes each ant toil for the ant-hill and each cell in the
tissue work for the organism. But intelligence intervenes with
its faculty of choice; this is a new force which maintains the
other in a state of virtuality, or rather in a state of reality
barely discernible in its action, yet perceptible in its pressure:
just as the swinging to and fro of the pendulum in a clock,
while it prevents the tension of the spring from manifesting
itself by a sudden unwinding, is yet a consequence of this
tension, being an effect which exerts an inhibitive or regulat-
ing action on its causes. What then will intelligence do? It
is a faculty used naturally by the individual to meet the
difficulties of life; it will not follow the direction of a force
which, on the contrary, is working for the species, and which, if
it considers the individual at all, does so in the interest of the
species. It will make straight for selfish decisions. But this
will only be its first impulse. It cannot avoid reckoning with
the force of which it feels the invisible pressure. It will there-
fore persuade itself into thinking that an intelligent egoism
must allow all other egoisms their share. And if the intelli-
gence is that of a philosopher, it will build up a theory of
ethics in which the interpenetration of personal and general
interests will be demonstrated, and where obligation will be
brought back to the necessity, realized and felt, of thinking of
others, if we wish intelligently to do good to ourselves. But we
can answer that it does not suit us to see our interests in
this light, and it is therefore not obvious why we should still
feel obliged. Yet we are obliged, and intelligence is well aware
of it, since this is the very reason why it attempted the demon-
stration. But the truth is that its demonstration only seems
successful because it clears the way for something it does not

76 MORAL OBLIGATION CH.

mention, and which is the essential: a necessity that pertains
to experience and feeling, one which some argument has thrust
into the background and which an opposing argument re-
instates. What is therefore, strictly speaking, obligatory in
obligation does not come from intelligence. The latter only
supplies the element of hesitation in obligation. When it
appears to be the basis of obligation, it is merely sustaining it
in its resistance to a resistance, in the operation of inhibiting
itself from inhibiting. And we shall see in the next chapter
what helpers it enlists. For the present, let us revert to a
comparison we have found useful. An ant, accomplishing her
heavy task as if she never thought of herself, as if she only
lived for the ant-hill, is very likely in a somnambulistic state;
she is yielding to an irresistible necessity. Imagine her
suddenly becoming intelligent. She would reason about what
she had done, wonder why she had done it, would say it was
very foolish not to take things easy and have a good time.
"I have had enough of sacrifice, now is the time for a little
self-indulgence." And behold the natural order completely
upset. But nature is on the watch. She provided the ant with
the social instinct; she has just added to it, perhaps in response
to a transitory need of instinct, a gleam of intelligence. How-
ever slightly intelligence has thrown instinct out of gear, it
must incontinently set things to rights and undo what it has
done. An act of reasoning will therefore prove that it is all
to the interest of the ant to work for the ant-hill, and in this
way the obligation will apparently find a basis. But the truth
is that such a basis would be very unsafe, and that obliga-
tion already existed in all its force; intelligence has merely
hindered its own hindrance. Our ant-hill philosopher would
be none the less disinclined to admit this; he would doubtless
persist in attributing a positive and not a negative activity to
intelligence. And that is just what most moral philosophers
have done, either because they were intellectuals and afraid
of not according enough importance to intelligence, or rather
because obligation appeared to them as an indivisible entity,
defying analysis; on the contrary, if we see in it something
approximate to a compulsion which may be thwarted by a

i THE VITAL IMPETUS 77

resistance, we realize that the resistance has come from '
intelligence, the resistance to the resistance likewise, and that
the compulsion, which is the essential, has a different origin.
In truth, no philosopher can avoid initially postulating this
compulsion; but very often he postulates it implicitly, and not
in words. We have postulated it and said so. We connect it,
moreover, with a principle that it is impossible not to admit.
For, to whatever school of philosophy you belong, you are
bound to recognize that man is a living creature, that the
evolution of life along its two main lines has been accom-
plished in the direction of social life, that association is the
most general form of living activity, since life is organization,
and that, this being so, we pass by imperceptible transitions
from the relation between cells in an organism to the relation
between individuals in society. We therefore confine ourselves
to noting what is uncontroverted and incontrovertible. But,
this being admitted, any theorising on obligation becomes un-
necessary as well as futile: unnecessary because obligation is
a necessity of life; ineffectual because the hypothesis pre-
sented can, at the utmost, afford justification in the eyes of
intelligence, and very incomplete justification at that, for an
obligation anterior to this intellectual reconstruction.

Now, life might have stopped at this point and done
nothing more than create closed societies, whose members
were bound together by strict obligations. Composed of
intelligent beings, these societies would have presented varia-
tions not to be found in animal societies, which are governed
by instinct; but the variations would not have gone so far as
to encourage the dream of a root and branch transformation;
society would not have become modified to the extent that a
single society, embracing all mankind, could seem possible.
In fact, this society does not yet, and perhaps never will, exist;
in according to man the requisite moral conformation for
living in groups, nature probably did all she could for the
species. But, just as there have been men of genius to thrust
back the bounds of intelligence, and, thus, far more has
been granted to individuals, at certain intervals, than it was
possible to grant all at once to the species, so exceptional

78 MORAL OBLIGATION CH.

souls have appeared who sensed their kinship with the soul of
Everyman, who thus, instead of remaining within the limits of
the group and going no further than the solidarity laid down by
nature, were borne on a great surge of love towards humanity
in general. The appearance of each one of them was like the
creation of a new species, composed of one single individual,
the vital impulse culminating at long intervals in one par-
ticular man, a result which could not have been obtained at
one stroke by humanity as a whole. Each of these souls
marked then a certain point attained by the evolution of life;
and each of them was a manifestation, in an original form,
of a love which seems to be the very essence of the creative
effort. The creative emotion which exalted these exceptional
souls, and which was an overflowing of vitality, has spread
far and wide about them; enthusiasts themselves, they radi-
ated enthusiasm which has never been completely quenched,
and which can be readily fanned into flame again. To-day,
when in imagination we call to life these great moral leaders,
when we listen to their words and see them at work, we feel
that they communicate to us something of their fervour, and
draw us in their wake; this is no longer a more or less attenu-
ated compulsion, it is a more or less irresistible attraction.
But neither does this second force, any more than the first,
call for an explanation. For you cannot reject these two data:
a compulsion, or something like it, exerted by habits which
correspond, in man, to what you call instinct in animals, and,
beside this, a certain stirring up of the soul, which you call
emotion; in the one case you have primal obligation, in the
other, something which becomes an extension of it; but in both
cases you are confronted by forces which are not strictly and
exclusively moral, and whose origin, therefore, it is no special
duty of the moralist to trace. Because they have nevertheless
insisted on doing so, philosophers have misunderstood the
compound nature of obligation in its present-day form: they
have been led to attribute to this or that mental picture or
operation the power of influencing the will: as if an idea could
ever categorically demand its own realization 1 as if the idea
were anything else, in this case, than an intellectual extract

i TRAINING AND MYSTICISM 79

common to all, or, better still, the projection on to the intellect-
ual plane of a whole set of tendencies and aspirations, some
above, some beneath pure intelligence! Reinstate the duality
of origin, and the difficulties vanish. Nay, the duality itself
merges into a unity, for "social pressure" and "impetus of
love" are but two complementary manifestations of life,
normally intent on preserving generally the social form which
was characteristic of the human species from the beginning,
but, exceptionally, capable of transfiguring it, thanks to in-
dividuals who each represent, as the appearance of a new
species would have represented, an effort of creative evolution.
All teachers have not perhaps a full perception of this
double origin of morality, but they perceive something of it
as soon as they try to inculcate morality into their pupils
instead of merely talking about it. We do not deny the
utility, the necessity even, of a moral instruction which appeals
to reason alone, defining duties and connecting them with a
principle of which it follows out in detail the various applica-
tions. It is on the plane of intelligence, and on that plane
alone, that discussion is possible, and there is no complete
morality without reflexion, analysis and argument with others
as well as with oneself. But if instruction directed to the
intelligence be indispensable to give confidence and delicacy
to the moral sense, if it make us fully capable of carrying out
our intention where our intention is good, yet the intention
must exist in the first place, and intention marks a direction
of the will as much as and more than of intelligence. How can
we get a hold over the will? Two ways lie open to the teacher.
The one is that of training, in the highest meaning of the
word; the other the mystic way, the term being taken here, on
the contrary, in its most restricted sense. By the first method
is inculcated a morality made up of impersonal habits; by
the second we obtain the imitation of a person, and even a
spiritual union, a more or less complete identification. The
primeval training, the training intended by nature, consisted in
adopting the habits of the group; it was automatic; it took place
spontaneously in those cases where the individual felt himself
half merged in the collectivity. As society became different!-

8o MORAL OBLIGATION CH.

ated through a division of labour, it delegated to the groups
thus formed within itself the task of training the individual,
of putting him in harmony with the group and thereby with
society itself; but it was still nothing more than a system of
habits formed for the sole benefit of society. That a morality
of this type may suffice at a pinch, if it be complete, there is
no doubt. Thus the man confined strictly within the limits of
his calling or profession, wholly absorbed in his daily task,
with his life organized so as to turn out the greatest possible
quantity, the best possible quality of work, would generally
fulfil ipso facto many other obligations. Discipline would
have made him an honest man. This is the first method: it
works in the sphere of the impersonal. The other can supple-
ment it, if need be; it may even take its place. We do not
hesitate to call it religious, and even mystic; but we must
agree upon the meaning of the words. People are fond of
saying that religion is the helpmeet of morality in that it
induces a fear of punishment and a hope of reward. This is
perhaps true, but they should add that, in this direction,
religion does little more than promise an extension and recti-
fication of human justice by divine justice: to the rewards and
punishments established by society, whose application is so
far from perfect, it adds others, infinitely higher, to be meted
out to us in the City of God, when we shall have left the city
of men; still it is on the same plane of the city of men that we
thus remain; religion is brought in, doubtless, but not in its
specifically religious aspect; however high the teaching may
rise, it still looks upon moral education as training, and upon
morality as discipline; so that it still clings to the first of our
two methods, it has not yet sprung over to the second. On the
other hand, it is of religious dogmas and the metaphysical
theories they imply that we generally think as soon as the
word religion is mentioned: so that when religion is said to be
the foundation of morality, we picture to ourselves a group of
conceptions relating to God and the world, the acceptance of
which is supposed to result in the doing of good. But it is
quite clear that these conceptions, taken as such, influence our
will and our conduct in the same way as theories may do, that

i TRAINING AND MYSTICISM 81

is to say, ideas; we are here on the intellectual plane, and, as I
hinted above, neither obligation nor the force which extends it
can possibly originate in bare ideas, the latter only working
on our will to the extent which it pleases us to accept them
or put them into practice. Now if you distinguish this meta-
physical system from all others by saying that it compels our
assent, you may again be right, but then you are not thinking
of its content alone, of ideas pure and simple; you introduce
something different, which underpins the representation,
which imparts to it some undeniable efficacy, and which is the
specifically religious element: but then it is this element, and
not the metaphysics with which you have associated it, which
becomes the religious basis of morality. Here indeed we are
concerned with the second method, but then we are dealing
with mystic experience. I mean mystic experience taken in its
immediacy, apart from all interpretation. True mystics simply
open their souls to the oncoming wave. Sure of themselves,
because they feel within them something better than them-
selves, they prove to be great men of action, to the surprise
of those for whom mysticism is nothing but visions, and
raptures and ecstasies. That which they have allowed to flow
into them is a stream flowing down and seeking through
them to reach their fellow-men; the necessity to spread
around them what they have received affects them like an on-
slaught of love. A love which each one of them stamps with
his own personality. A love which is in each of them an
entirely new emotion, capable of transposing human life into
another tone. A love which thus causes each of them to be
loved for himself, so that through him, and for him, other
men will open their souls to the love of humanity. A love
which can be just as well passed on through the medium of a
person who has attached himself to them or to their ever-
green memory and formed his life on that pattern. Let us go
further. If a word of a great mystic, or some one of his
imitators, finds an echo in one or another of us, may it not be
that there is a mystic dormant within us, merely waiting for
an occasion to awake? In the first case a person attaches
himself to the impersonal and aims at finding room inside it.

82 .' MORAL OBLIGATION CH. i

Here he responds to the call of a personality, perhaps that of a
revealer of moral life or one of his imitators, or even in certain
circumstances of his own person.

Whichever of these two methods be adopted, in both cases
the foundations of human nature have been taken into account,
whether considered statically in itself, or dynamically in its
origin. The mistake would be to think that moral pressure
and moral aspiration find their final explanation in social
life considered merely as a fact. We are fond of saying that
society exists, and that hence it inevitably exerts a constraint
on its members, and that this constraint is obligation. But
in the first place, for society to exist at all the individual must
bring into it a whole group of inborn tendencies; society
therefore is not self-explanatory; so we must search below
the social accretions, get down to Life, of which human
societies, as indeed the human species altogether, are but
manifestations. But this is not going far enough; we must
delve deeper still if we want to understand, not only how
society "constrains" individuals, but again how the individual
can set up as a judge and wrest from it a moral transforma-
tion. If society is self-sufficient, it is the supreme authority.
But if it is only one of the aspects of life, we can easily con-
ceive that life, which has had to set down the human species
at a certain point of its evolution, imparts a new impetus to
exceptional individuals who have immersed themselves anew
in it, so that they can help society further along its way.
True, we shall have had to pusluon as far as the very principle
of life. Everything is obscure if we confine ourselves to mere
manifestations, whether they are all called indiscriminately
social, or whether one examines, in social man, more par-
ticularly the feature of intelligence. All becomes clear, on
the contrary, if we start by a quest beyond these manifesta-
tions for Life itself. Let us then give to the word biology
the very wide meaning it should have, and will perhaps have
one day, and let us say in conclusion that all morality, be it
pressure or aspiration, is in essence biological.

CHAPTER II

STATIC RELIGION

THE spectacle of what religions have been in the past, of
what certain religions still are to-day, is indeed humiliating
for human intelligence. What a farrago of error and folly!
Experience may indeed say "that is false", and reasoning "that
is absurd". Humanity only clings all the more to that absurdity
and that error. And if this were all! But religion has been
known to enjoin immorality, to prescribe crime. The cruder
it is, the more actual space it occupies in the Jjfe of apeppte.
What it will have to share later with science, art, philosophy,
it demands and obtains at first for itself alone. And that is
indeed a matter for surprise, seeing that we began by defining
man as an intelligent being.

Our bewilderment increases when we see that the most crass
superstition has so long been a universal fact. Indeed it still
survives. We find in the past, we could find to-day, human
societies with neither science nor art nor philosophy. But!
there has never been a society without religion.

What should be then our confusion, Were we to compare
ourselves with animals on this point! It is highly probable
that animals are unacquainted with superstition. We know
but little of what goes on in minds not our own; but, since
religious feeling generally finds expression in attitudes or
in acts, we should certainly be made aware by some sign, if
animals were capable of a religious sense. But there is nothing
for it, facts must be faced. Homo sapiens, the only creature
endowed with reason, is also the only creature to pin its
existence to things unreasonable.

People talk, indeed, of a "primitive mentality", as, for
example, to-day that of the inferior races, and in days gone
by that of humanity in general, at whose door the responsi-
bility for superstition should be laid. If this means the mere

83

84 STATIC RELIGION CH.

grouping of certain ways of thinking under one common
heading, and the noting of ^certain connecting links between
them, that is indeed useful and unexceptionable work; useful
in that it marks off # field of ethnological and psychological
studies which are of the greatest interest; unexceptionable
since it does no more than establish the existence of certain
beliefs and certain practices in a humanity less civilized than
our own. It is to this that M. Levy-Bruhl has apparently
confined himself in his remarkable works and particularly
in the later ones. But this leaves untouched the question as
to how beliefs and practices which are anything but reason-
able could have been, and still are, accepted by reasonable
beings. We cannot refrain from seeking an answer to this
question. Whether he will or no, the reader of M. Levy-
Bruhl 's admirable books will draw from them the conclusion
that human intelligence has gone through a process of evolu-
tion, that natural logic has not always been the same, that
"primitive mentality" corresponds to a different fundamental
structure, which was supplanted by our own, and which is
only found to-day among backward peoples. But this is an
admission that habits of mind acquired by individuals in
the course of centuries can have become hereditary, modify-
ing nature and giving a new mentality to the species. There
is nothing more questionable. Even supposing that a habit
formed by parents is ever transmitted to the child, it is a rare
occurrence, due to accidental coincidence of a whole con-
course of circumstances: it will give rise to no modification
of the species. But then, since the structure of the mind
remains the same, the experience acquired by successive
generations, deposited in the social environment, and given
back to each of us by these surroundings, should suffice to
explain why we do not think like uncivilized man, why man
of bygone days was different from man of to-day. The mind
works just the same in both cases, but it may not be working
on the same material, because the needs of society are scarcely
likely to be the same in the one case as in the other. Our own
investigations willlndeed lead us to this conclusion. Without
anticipating it, let us merely say that the observation of

ii OF ABSURDITY IN THE REASONING BEING 85

"primitive beings" inevitably raises the question of the
psychological origin of superstition, and that the general
structure of human thought the observation therefore of
civilized man of the present day will appear to us to supply
sufficient data for the solution of the problem.

We shall have much the same thing to say when we come
to "collective" instead of "primitive" mentality. According
to Emile Durkheim, there is no need to try and find out
why those things which such or such a religion ask us to
believe "appear so disconcerting to individual minds. This
is simply because the representation of those things by 1
religion is not the work of these minds, but that of the col-
lective mind. Now it is natural that this mentality should see 1
reality differently from our own mind, since it is of another
nature. Society has its own mode of existence peculiar to
it, and therefore its own mode of thinking." x So far as we
are concerned, we shall readily admit the existence of collect-
ive representations, deposited in institutions, language and
customs. Together they constitute a social intelligence which
is the complement of individual intelligences. But we fail to
see why these two mentalities should clash, and why one
should be liable to "disconcert" the other. Experience teaches
nothing of the kind, and sociology appears to us to afford no
grounds for the supposition. If we held the view that nature
stopped short at the individual, that society is the result of
an accident or a convention, we could push the argument
to its conclusion and maintain that this conjunction of in-
dividuals, similar to that of primary elements united in a
chemical combination, has given birth to a collective intelli-
gence, certain representations of which will be puzzling to
the individual mind. But nowadays nobody attributes an
accidental or contractual origin to society. If sociology is open
to criticism, it would rather be that it leans too much the
other way: certain of its exponents tend to regard the
individual as an abstraction, and the social body as the only
reality. But in that case, how could it be that the collective
mentality is not prefigured in the individual mentality? How
1 Annie sociologique, vol. ii. pp. 29 sqq.

86 STATIC RELIGION CH.

can we imagine that nature, having made man a "political
animal", so disposed human intelligence that it feels out of its
element when it thinks "politically"? For our part, we believe
that in the study of the individual one can never overestimate
the fact that the individual was meant for society. Because
it has not sufficiently taken this into account, psychology has
made such meagre progress in certain directions. I am not
speaking of the benefit to be derived from an intensive study
of certain abnormal or morbid states, implying among the
members of a community, as among the bees in a hive, an
invisible anastomosis: away from the hive, the bee pines
away and dies; isolated from society or sharing insufficiently
in its activities, man suffers from a similar malady very little
studied up to now, called listlessness; when isolation is
prolonged, as in solitary confinement, characteristic mental
troubles appear. These phenomena would well deserve to
have a separate account opened for them in the books of
psychology; when closed it would show a handsome profit.
But this is not putting it strongly enough. The future of a
science depends on the way it first dissects its object. If it
has had the luck to cut along the lines of the natural joints,
like Plato's good cook, the number of "cuts" is of little
matter; v as the cutting up into pieces will have prepared the
way for the analysis into elements, we shall be finally in
possession of a simplified representation of the whole. Our
psychologists do not sufficiently realize this when they shrink
from making subdivisions. For instance, they postulate certain
general faculties of perception, interpretation, comprehension,
without enquiring whether the mechanisms that come into
play are not different, according as the faculties apply to
persons or things, or according as the intelligence is immersed
or not in the social environment. And yet the mass of man-
kind has already sketched out this distinction, and has even
recorded it in language: alongside of the senses which inform
us about things it puts common sense, which bears on our
intercourse with people. We cannot help observing that, -a
man n^J^ a first-rate mjtheimto
or a subtle psychologist, as far as self-analysis goes, and yet

ii OF ABSURDITY IN*THE REASONING BEING 87

completely misunderstand the actions of ,other jnen, mis-

calculate Ris own ' aflcf"^^

his' i ^ < fftltiHffingsrEe, in a word, lacking in common sense!

f *.* -v*i - i iriUAy*\^ tf *' i ' Mi>M> ^ *** *-. -*** >> .-<w<ltt.- . -***. *.*..*-- .^-.-'

ThdTtfionomania of persecution, or more precisely of misinter-
pretation, is there to prove that .common sense may become
impaired while the reasoning faculties remain intact. The
gravity of this malady, its obstinate resistance to all treatment,
the fact that the early symptoms are generally to be detected
in the remotest past of the sufferer, everything would seem
to indicate that we have here a profound congenital psychic
insufficiency, and one that is clearly defined. Common sense,
then, or as it might be called, social sense, is innate in normal
man, like the faculty of speech, which also implies the
existence of society and which is none the less prefigured in
individual organisms. It is indeed hard to admit that nature,
which placed social life at the extremities of the two great
lines of evolution ending respectively 4i> the hymenopterae
and in man, while regulating beforehand the detailed activity
of every ant in the ant-hill, should have neglected to give man
any guiding principles, however general, for the co-ordination
of his conduct with that of his fellow-men. Human societies
doubtless differ from insect societies in that they leave y un-
determined the actions of the individual, and indeed those
of the collectivity also. But this is equivalent to saying that
it is the actions which are preordained in the insect's nature,
and that in man it is the faculty alone. The faculty is none
the less there, being so organized in the individual that it may
function in society. How then should there be a social
mentality supervening, as if it were an additional factor, and
liable to "disconcert" the individual mentality? How could
the first fail to be present in the second? The problem which
we stated, and which consists in ascertaining how absurd
superst
r

We saidtftait, though we may persist in speaking of primitive
mentality, the problem *none the less bears on the psychology
of the man of to-day. We shall add that, though we may
^persist in speaking of collective representations, the question

88 STATIC RELIGION CH.

none the less concerns the psychology of the individual
man.

But does not the difficulty lie precisely in the fact that our
psychology is not sufficiently concerned with the subdivision
of its subject in accordance with the lines laid down by
nature? The representations which produce superstitions
possess the common characteristic of being phantasmic.
Psychology relates them to a general faculty, imagination. It
will also place under the same heading the discoveries and
inventions of science and the achievements of art. But why
should we group together such different things, give them
the same name and thus suggest the idea of a mutual relation-
ship? We do so merely for convenience of speech and for the
entirely negative reason that these various activities are neither
perception, nor memory, nor logical operations of the mind.
Let us then agree to group phantasmic representations
separately, and to call " myth-making", or "fiction", the act
which produces them. This will be a first step towards the
solution of the problem. Let us now remark that psychology,
when it splits up the activities of the mind into operations,
does not take enough pains to find out the specific purpose
of each of them. And this is precisely why the subdivision
is all too often inadequate or artificial. Doubtless jjj^n call
dream and philosophize, but first of all he must live; there is
no doubt that our psychical structure originates in the neces-
sity of preserving and developing social and individual life.
If psychology does not make this consideration its guiding
principle, it will inevitably distort its object. What should we
say of a scientist who dealt with the anatomy of organs and
the histology of tissues without troubling about their use?
He would risk making erroneous divisions and erroneous
groupings. If function is only comprehensible from structure,
the main lines of a structure are not to be discerned without
some idea of its function. We must not therefore consider
the mind as being what it is "for no particular reason, just
for the fun of the thing". We must not say: its structure being
such, it has derived this or that^ advantage from it. The
advantage it derives from its structure is, on the contrary, the

ii THE MYTH-MAKING FUNCTION 89

factor which must have determined the latter; in any case
that is the clue for any research. Let us take, then, in the
vaguely and doubtless artificially defined realm of imagina-
tion, the natural "cut" which we have called myth-making
and see to what use it is naturally put. To this faculty are due
the novel, the drama, mythology together with all that pre-
ceded it. But then, there have not always been novelists and
dramatists, whereas humanity has never subsisted with-
out religion. Very likely, therefore, poetry and fantasy of
all kinds appeared as extras, benefiting from the fact that
the mind knew how to make myths, but religion is what
accounts for the myth-making function: faculty standing to
religion in the relationship of effect and not of cause. Some
need, individual perhaps, social in any case, must have
required from the mind this type of mental activity. Let us ask
what this need was. It must be noted that fiction, when it has
the power to move us, resembles an incipient hallucination:
it can thwart our judgment and reason, which are the strictly
intellectual faculties. Now what would nature have done, after
creating intelligent beings, if she had wanted to guard against
certain dangers of intellectual activity without compromising
the future of intelligence? Observation supplies us with the
answer. To-day, in the full efflorescence of scientific develop-
ment, We see the finest arguments in the world come to grief
in the face of a single experiment: nothing can resist facts.
So that if intelligence was to be kept at the outset from sliding
down a slope which was dangerous to the individual and
society, it could only be by the statement of apparent facts,
by the ghosts of facts; failing real experience, a counterfeit of,
experience had to be conjured up. A fiction, if its image is
vivid and insistent, may indeed masquerade as perception
and in 'that way prevent or modify action. A systematically
false experience, confronting the intelligence, may indeed stop
it pushing too far the conclusions it deduces from a true
'experience. It i$ in some such fashion that nature has pro-
ceeded. And that being so, we should not be surprised to
find that intelligence wajjpervaded, as soon as formed, by
superstition, that an essentially intelligent being is naturally

9 o STATIC RELIGION CH.

superstitious, and that intelligent creatures are the only
superstitious beings.

It is true that this raises new questions. We must en-
quire more carefully what is the utility of the myth-making
function, and what danger nature had to contend with. With-
out exploring this point yet, we must note that the human mind
may be in the right or in the wrong, but that in either case,
whatever direction it has taken, it goes straight ahead: from
one conclusion to another, from one analysis to another, it
plunges deeper into error, just as it may proceed further and
further along the path of truth. We are only acquainted with
humanity as already evolved, for the "primitives" we observe
to-day are as old as we are, and the documents upon which
the history of religion works belong to a relatively recent past.
1 So the immense variety of beliefs with which we have to deal
is the result of a lengthy process of proliferation. From their
absurdity or strangeness we may doubtless conclude that
there is a certain tendency towards the strange or the absurd
in the working of a certain function of the mind; but these
characteristics are probably thus accentuated simply because
the operation has gone so far: if we take into consideration
the direction alone, we shall be less surprised at the irrational
elements in the tendency, and we may be able to grasp its
utility. Who knows indeed if the errors into which this
tendency led are not the distortions, at the time beneficial to
the species, of a truth destined to be later revealed to certain
individuals? But this is not all. A second question arises,
which must in fact be answered first: what is the origin of
this tendency? Is it connected with other manifestations of
life? We spoke of an intention of nature; it was a metaphor,
as convenient in psychology as it is in biology; we thus stressed
the fact that the contrivance with which we were dealing
served the interests either of the individual or the species.
But the expression is vague, and for the sake of clarity we
should say that the tendency under consideration is an in-
stinct, were it not that it is precisely in the place of an instinct
that these phantasmic images arise in the mind. They play a
part which might have devolved on instinct, and which would

ii MYTH-MAKING AND LIFE 91

actually do so in a being devoid of intelligence. Let us say,
for the time being, that it is a virtual instinct, meaning that
at the extremity of another line of evolution, in insect societies,
we find instinct automatically inducing a behaviour com-
parable, in its utility, to the behaviour which is suggested to
man, a being both intelligent and free, by these well-nigh
hallucinatory images. But in thus alluding to divergent and
complementary developments, which are supposed to have
led, on the one hand, to real instincts, on the other to virtual
instincts, are we not putting forward a specific view of the
evolution of life?

Such is indeed the wider problem raised by our second
question. It was implicitly contained in the first. How is it
possible to relate to a vital need those fictions which confront
and sometimes thwart our intelligence, if we have not ascer-
tained the fundamental demands of life? We shall find later
this same problem again in a still more explicit form, when
a question arises which we cannot avoid, the question of how
religion has survived the danger which brought it into being.
How, instead of dying out, it simply became transformed?
Why does it still live on, though science has come to fill the
gap, dangerous indeed, left between the form and the matter
of intelligence? May it not be that underlying the need for
stability, which life reveals in that stop, or rather that marking
time on the same spot, which denotes the preservation of the
species, there i^some demandjpr a forward movement, some
remnant of an impuTse,"tp wit, a vital impetus? But the two
first' questions' will' suffice for the present. They both bring
us back to the considerations we have already submitted on
the evolution of life. These considerations were by no means
hypothetical, as some apparently have thought. In speaking
of a "vital impetus" and a creative evolution, we were keeping
as close as we could to actual experience. This is what many
are* beginning to realize, since positive science, merely by
abandoning certain theoretical ideas or giving them out as
mere hypotheses, is drawing nearer to our views. In ap-
propriating them, it would only be entering into its own
again.

92 STATIC RELIGION CH.

Let us then go back over a few of the outstanding features
of life, and emphasize the distinctly empirical character of our
conception of the "vital impetus". We asked whether the
phenomena of life - could be resolved into physical and
chemical facts? When the physiologist affirms such a thing,
he means, consciously or unconsciously, that the business of
physiology is to bring out whatever is physical and chemical
in the vital, that it is impossible to say when the search will
end, and that, therefore, he must proceed as though the
search were never to have an end; that this is the only way
to go forward. He is thus only laying down the rules of a
method; he is not stating a fact. Let us then keep to experi-
ence: we shall say and more than one biologist acknowledges
it that science is as far as ever from a physico-chemical
explanation of life. That is what we stated, to begin with,
when speaking of a vital impetus. Now, life being given
as a fact, how are we to picture its evolution? Some may
maintain that the passage from one species to another was
accomplished by a series of variations, all of them accidental,
being preserved by selection and fixed by heredity. But if we
reflect on the enormous number of variations, co-ordinate
with and complementary to one another, which must take
place in order that the organism shall benefit by them or even
merely not be injured, we wonder how each one of them,
taken separately, can be preserved by selection and wait for
others which are to complete it. By itself, one of these
variations is more often than not useless; it may even hamper
or paralyse the function. So that in invoking a combination
of chance with chance, in attributing to no special cause the
direction taken by life which is evolving, biology applies a
priori the principle of economy, which finds favour with
positive science, but by no means establishes a fact, and at
once comes up against insurmountable difficulties. This in-
adequacy of Darwinism is the second point we brought out
when we spoke of the vital impetus: to a theory we opposed a
fact, we pointed out that the evolution of life occurred in
certain definite directions. Now, are these directions imposed
on life by the conditions in which it evolves? This would

ii THE VITAL IMPETUS 93

amount to admitting that the modifications undergone by
the, individual are handed down to his descendants, at least
regularly enough to ensure, for instance, the gradual com-
plication of an organ accomplishing the same function with
ever greater precision. But the heredity of acquired charac-
teristics is debatable, and, even supposing that it is observed,
exceptional; once again it is a priori, and in order to meet
the needs of the argument, that it is taken to be operating
regularly. Let us attribute this regular transmissibility to
the innate: we shall conform to experience and we shall
say that it is not the mechanical action of external causes,
but an inward impulse that passes from germ to germ through
individuals, that carries life in a given direction, towards an
ever higher complexity. Such is the third idea to be evoked by
the image of the vital impetus. Let us go further. When one
speaks of the progress of an organism or an organ adapting
itself to more complex conditions, one means, more often
than not, that the complexity of conditions imposes its form
on life, as the mould does on the clay: thus alone, one says,
is a mechanical, that is a scientific, explanation obtainable.
But, after affording oneself the satisfaction of interpreting
adaptation in general in this way, one reasons in each par-
ticular case as if the adaptation were something quite different
as indeed it is as if it were the original solution, found by
life, of the problem set by external conditions. And this
faculty of resolving problems is left unexplained. By intro-
ducing at this point "impetus" we did not proffer an explan-
ation either; but, instead of systematically rejecting it in
general while resorting to it on the sly in each particular case,
we brought out this mysterious character of the operation
of life. But did we do nothing to fathom the mystery? If the
marvellous co-ordination of the parts with the whole cannot
be explained in terms of mechanics, yet it does not demand,
in our opinion, to be treated as finality. The same thing
which, seen from outside, can be decomposed into an infinity
of parts co-ordinated with one another, may perhaps appear,
if realized from inside, an undivided act: just as a movement
of the hand, which we feel to be indivisible, is perceived from

94 STATIC RELIGION CH.

outside as a curve definable by an equation, that is to say, as
a series of points infinite in number, adjacent one to the other,
and all obeying one and the same law. In evoking the image
of an impetus, we wished to suggest this fifth idea, and even
something more: where our analysis, which remains out-
side, finds positive elements in ever increasing numbers
elements which strike us for that very reason as more and
more marvellously co-ordinate with one another ^intuition,
transferring itself to the inside, would be confronted not
with factors that are being combined, but with obstacles
that are being circumvented. An invisible hand thrust
through a heap of iron filings would merely brush aside
the resistance encountered, but the very simplicity of this
act, seen from the point of view of the resistance, would
appear as an alignment, made in a deliberate order, of the
filings themselves. Now is there nothing to be said con-
cerning this act and the resistance it encounters? If life
cannot be resolved into physical and chemical facts, it oper-
ates in the manner of a special cause, added on to what
we ordinarily call matter, matter in this case being both an
instrument and an obstacle. It divides what it defines. We
may conjecture that a division of this kind is responsible for
the multiplicity of the great lines of vital evolution. But we
thereby obtain a suggestion as to the means of preparing and
verifying the intuition we would fain have of life. If we see
two or three big lines of evolution running freely forward,
alongside other lines which end in a blind road, and if along
each of these lines an essential characteristic develops mdre
and more, we may conjecture that the vital impulse began
by possessing these characteristics in a state of reciprocal
implication: instinct and intelligence, which reach their cul-
minating point at the extremities of the two principal lines
of animal evolution, must therefore be taken one with the
other, before their separation: not combined into one, but
one in the beginning, instinct and intelligence being then
mere views, taken from two different points, of that simple
reality. Such are, since we have begun to number them, the
sixth, seventh and eighth ideas which are to be evoked by the

ii THE VITAL IMPETUS 95

ideaof avital impetus. And even then we have not mentioned,
save perhaps by implication, the essential one, namely the
impossibility of forecasting the forms which life creates in
their entirety by discontinuous leaps, all along the lines of
its evolution. Whether you embrace the doctrine of pure
mechanism or that of pure finality, in either case the creations
of life are supposed to be predetermined, the future being
deducible from the present by a calculation, or designed
within it as an idea, time being thus unavailing. Pure
experience suggests nothing of the sort. "Neither impul-
sion nor attraction" seems to be its motto. Now it is just
something of this kind that an impetus can suggest, whilst
it can also, by the indivisibility of what is felt internally and
the divisibility to infinity of what is externally perceived,
give the idea of that real and effective duration which is the
essential attribute of life. Such were the ideas we con-
densed into the image of the "vital impetus". To neglect
them, as has been too often done, is to find oneself con-
fronted by an empty concept, like that of the pure "will to
live", and by a barren theory of metaphysics. By taking them
into account, we have an idea full of matter, obtained empiric-
ally, capable of guiding our investigations, which will broadly
sum up what we know of the vital process and will also bring
out what is still unknown.

From this standpoint, evolution appears as a series of
sudden leaps, and the variation constituting the new species
as made up of a multitude of differences completing one
another, and emerging all together in the organism formed
from the germ. To use again the same comparison, it is like
the sudden movement of the hand plunged among the iron
filings and causing an instantaneous readjustment of them all.
Now, if the transformation takes place in various representa-
tives of the same species, it may not be equally successful in all
cases. It may well be that the appearance of the human species
was due to several leaps in the same direction, taking place
here and there in a previous species and thus resulting in some-
what different types of humanity; each type would then corre-
spond to a successful attempt, in the sense that the multiple

96 STATIC RELIGION CH.

variations characterising each one are perfectly co-ordinate
with one another; but they might not be equal in quality,
the leaps not having covered the same distance in every case.
They, none the less, might have all taken place in the same
direction. We could say, whilst refraining from fixing any
anthropomorphic sense to the word, that they correspond to
one and the same intention of life.

Now, whether the human species sprang or not from one
stock, whether we have to deal with a single type of humanity
or with several, which cannot be reduced to a common
denominator, it is of little consequence; mankind always pre-
sents two essential characteristics, intelligence and sociability.
But, from our standpoint, these features take on a special
meaning. They are no longer a matter for the psychologist
and the sociologist only. They call, first of all, for a bio-
logical interpretation. Intelligence and sociability must be
given their proper place back in the general evolution of
life.

To take sociability first, we find it in its finished form at the
two culminating points of evolution, in the hymenopterous
insects, such as the ants and bees, and in man. As a mere
tendency, it is found everywhere in nature. Some biologists
have gone so far as to say that the individual is already a
society: the protozoa, formed from a single cell, it is suggested,
constituted aggregates which, coming together in their turn,
produced aggregates of aggregates; and thus the most widely
differentiated organisms originated in the associations of
elementary organisms barely differentiated from one another.
This is obviously an exaggeration; "polyzoism" is an excep-
tional and abnormal occurrence. But it is none the less a fact
that things take place in a higher organism as if the cells had
joined together to share the work between them. The bent
towards the social form, found in so many species, is therefore
evident in the very structure of any of its members. But, once
more, this is merely a tendency; and if we wish to deal with
fully complete societies, clear-cut organizations of distinct
individuals, we must take the two perfect types of association
represented by a society of insects and a human society, the

ii SOCIAL SIGNIFICANCE OF MYTH-MAKING 97

one immutable, 1 the other subject to change; the one instinc-
tive, the other intelligent; the first similar to an organism
whose elements only exist in the interest of the whole, the
second leaving so wide a margin to the individual that we
cannot tell whether the organism was made for them or they
for the organism. Of the two conditions laid down by Comte,
"order" and "progress", the insect chose order only, whereas
the aim of at least a section of humanity is progress, some-
times exclusive of order, and always due to individual
initiative. These two finished types of social life are then the
counterpart of each other and mutually complementary. But
the same could be said of instinct and intelligence, which
characterize them respectively. When given their place again
in the evolution of life, they appear, as it were, two divergent
and complementary activities.

We shall not go over again what we have stated in a former
work. Let us merely recall the fact that life is a certain effort
to obtain certain things from raw matter, and that instinct
and intelligence, taken in their finished state, are two distinct
means of utilizing a tool for this object; in the first case, the
tool is part of the living creature; in the other, it is an in-
organic instrument which man has had to invent, make and
learn to handle. Grant the fact of utilization, still more the
fact of fabrication, and then, most of all, the fact of invention,
and you will find one after the other all the elements of
intelligence, for its purpose explains its structure. But we
must not forget that there still hangs round the edge of in-
telligence a fringe of instinct, and that in the depths of
instinct there still survive gleams of intelligence. We may
conjecture that they were originally involved in one another
and that, if we went far enough back into the past, we should
find instincts that are nearer to intelligence than those of our
insects, and an intelligence closer to instinct than that of our
vertebrates. The two activities, which began by mutual inter-
penetration, had to part company in order to grow; but some-

1 It goes without saying that the immutability is not absolute but
essential. It exists in principle, but in fact admits of variations on the
theme once posited.

98 STATIC RELIGION CH.

thing of the one has remained attached to the other. Indeed
the same thing could be said of all the important manifesta-
tions of life. In most cases each reveals, frequently in a
rudimentary, latent, or virtual state, the essential character-
istics of most of the 'other manifestations.

If we study, then, at the terminal point of one of the great
efforts of nature, these essentially intelligent and partially
free groups of beings which constitute human societies, we
must not lose sight of the other terminal point of evolution,
the societies swayed by pure instinct, in which the individual
blindly serves the interests of the community. This com-
parison will never justify firm conclusions; but it may suggest
interpretations. If societies are to be found at the two
principal terminal points of the evolutionary movement, and
if the individual organism is constructed on a plan which
foreshadows that on which societies are organized, this means
that life is a co-ordination of disciplined elements among
which the work is divided; in fact, that the social underlies
the vital. If, in those societies with which individual organ-
isms are already identifiable, the constituent part must be
ready to sacrifice itself for the whole, if this is still so in
those societies of societies which form, at the end of one
of the two great lines of evolution, the hive and the ant-
hill, and lastly, if this result is obtained by instinct which
is but an extension of nature's work of organization, this
means that nature is more concerned with society than with
the individual. If that is no longer the case with man, this
means that the inventive effort manifested throughout the
domain of life by the creation of new species has found in
humanity alone the means of continuing its activity through
individuals, on whom there has devolved, along with in-
telligence, the faculty of initiative, independence and liberty.
If intelligence now threatens to break up social cohesion
at certain points, arid assuming that society is to go on,
there must be a counterpoise, at these points, to intelli-
gence. If this counterpoise cannot be instinct itself, for the
very reason that its place has been taken by intelligence, the
same effect must be produced by a virtuality of instinct, or, if

ii SOCIAL SIGNIFICANCE OF MYTH-MAKING 99

you prefer it, by the residue of instinct which survives on the
fringe of intelligence: it cannot exercise direct action, but,
since intelligence works on representations, it will call up
"imaginary" ones, which will hold their own against the
representation of reality and will succeed, through the agency
of intelligence itself, in counteracting the work of intelli-
gence. This would be the explanation of the myth-making
faculty. Though indeed it plays a social role, it must also serve
the individual, whom as often as not it is to the interest
of society to favour. We may therefore presume that in its
original and elementary form it brings added strength to the
individual. But before coming to the second point, let us
consider the first.

Among the facts collected by "psychical research", we
noticed some years ago the following case. A lady was on the
upper floor of an hotel. As she wanted to go downstairs, she
walked out on to the landing. The gate provided for the lift
happened to be open. As the gate was so contrived as to be
open only if the lift were stopped at that floor, she naturally
thought the lift was there and rushed forward to take it. All of
a sudden she felt herself flung backwards; the man entrusted
with the working of the lift had just appeared and was pushing
her back on to the landing. At this point she emerged from
her fit of abstraction. She was amazed to see that neither man
nor lift were there. The mechanism being out of order, it was
possible for the gate to be open at her floor, though the lift
wsts still down below. She had been about to fling herself into
the gaping void ; a miraculous hallucination had saved her
life. Need we say that the miracle is easily explained? The
lady had reasoned correctly on a real fact, for the gate was
really open and therefore the lift should have been at that
floor. The mere sight of the empty shaft would have been
enough to show her her mistake; but it would have been too
late, the action consequent upon the correct reasoning being
already under way. It was then that the instinctive or som-
nambulistic self, which underlies the reasoning personality,
came into action. It had seen the danger, it had to act at once.

ioo STATIC RELIGION CH.

Instantly it had thrown her body backwards, at the same time
inducing in a flash the fictitious, hallucinatory perception the
best fitted to evoke and explain the apparently unjustified
movement.

Let us imagine then a primitive humanity and rudimentary
societies. It would be a simple matter for nature to ensure the
requisite cohesion within the groups; she would only have to
endow man with the appropriate instincts. This she did for
the bee-hive and the ant-hill. And with complete success:
here the individual lives for the community alone. Indeed her
task was an easy one, since she only had to follow her usual
method; instinct is indeed coextensive with life, and social
instinct, as found in insects, is nothing more than the spirit
of subordination and co-ordination animating the cells and
tissues and organs of all living bodies. But it is no longer
towards a mere development of instinct, it is towards an ex-
pansion of intelligence, that the vital impulse of the verte-
brate tends. When the end of the movement is attained in
man, instinct is not abolished, it is eclipsed; all that remains
of it is a dim penumbra about the centre, now fully illumin-
ated or rather in itself luminous, to wit, intelligence. Hence-
forth reflexion will enable the individual to invent, and
society to progress. But if society is to progress, it must first
of all be able to maintain itself. Invention means initiative,
and an appeal to individual initiative straightaway involves
the risk of endangering social discipline. What if the in-
dividual diverts his reflexion from the object for which it was
designed, I mean from the task to be performed, the improve-
ment or renovation to be undertaken, and focuses it on
himself, on the constraint imposed on him by social life, on
the sacrifice he makes to the community? If he were a slave
of instinct, like the ant and the bee, he would remain intent
on the purely external object to be attained; he would have
automatically, somnambulistically, worked for the species.
Endowed with intelligence, roused to thought, he will turn
to himself and think only of leading a pleasant life. Formal
reasoning would doubtless show him that he furthers his own
interest by promoting the happiness of others; but it takes

ii SOCIAL SIGNIFICANCE OF MYTH-MAKING 101

centuries of culture to produce a utilitarian such as John
Stuart Mill, and Stuart Mill has not convinced all philos-
ophers, let alone the mass of mankind. The truth is that
intelligence would counsel egoism first. The intelligent being
will rush in that direction if there is nothing to stop him. But
nature is on the watch. Just now, before the open gate a
guardian appeared, to bar the way and drive back the tres-
passer. So now some protective deity of the city will be there
to forbid, threaten, punish. Intelligence is guided in fact by
present perceptions or by that more or less vivid residue of
perception called recollection. Since instinct no longer exists
except as a mere vestige or virtuality, since it is not strong
enough to incite to action or prevent it, it must arouse an
illusory perception, or at least a counterfeit of recollection so
clear and striking that intelligence will come to a decision
accordingly. Looked at from this first point of view, religion is
then a defensive reaction of nature against the dissolvent power
of intelligence.

But this only gives us a figurative symbolization of what
actually occurs. For the sake of greater clearness, we have
supposed in society a sudden revolt of the individual, and in
the individual imagination the sudden apparition of a god to
prevent or forbid. Things doubtless take this dramatic form
at given times and for a certain period in a humanity already
well along the road to civilization. But reality only develops
towards the precision of drama by intensification of the
essential and elimination of the superfluous. Indeed in
human groups, just as they may have come from the hands of
nature, the distinction between what does and what does not
affect the cohesion of the group is not so clear, the con-
sequences of an act accomplished by the individual do not
appear so strictly individual, the force of inhibition which
arises at the very instant when the act is on the point of being
accomplished is not so completely incarnated in a person.
Let us dwell on these three points.

In societies such as ours there are customs and laws. The
laws are doubtless often stabilized customs: but a custom
only becomes a law when it is of particular, recognizable and

102 STATIC RELIGION CH.

definable value; then it stands out from among the others.
The distinction is therefore clear between the essential and
the accidental: we have, on the one hand, what is merely
custom, on the other, what is legal, or even moral, obligation.
This cannot be so in less advanced societies where we find
only customs, some of them justified by a real need, most of
them due to mere accident, or to an irrational extension of
the former. Here all customary things are perforce obligatory,
since social solidarity, not being condensed into laws, and still
less into principles, is diluted into an acceptance by all and
sundry of these customs. Everything habitual to the members
of the group, everything that society expects from individuals,
isjbound to take on a religious character, jf it is true that the
observance of custom, and that alone, attaches man to other
men, and thus detaches him from himself. Let us note, by the
way, that the question of the relation between morality and
religion is thus greatly simplified when we consider rudiment-
ary societies. Primitive religions can only be called non-
moral, or indifferent to morality, if we take religion as it was
in the beginning and compare it with morality such as it
became later on. Originally the whole of morality is custom;
and as religion forbids any departure from custom, morality
is coextensive with religion. It would therefore be vain to
raise the objection that religious prohibitions have not always
dealt with things that strike us to-day as immoral or anti-
social. Primitive religion, taken from our first standpoint, is
a precaution against the danger man runs, as soon as he thinks
at all, of thinking of himself alone. It is therefore, as we stated
above, a defensive reaction of nature against intelligence.

On the other hand, the idea of individual regpnn&;hility is
by no means so simple as might be supposed. It implies
a relativelY_absJtract representation of the activity of the,in-
dividual, which is taken to be independent because it has
been isolated from social, activity* But the solidarity between
the membefsTof Hie group is such at first that all are bound to
feel that they share to some degree in the lapse of any single
one, at least in such cases as they consider serious: moral evil,
if we can use the term at this stage, is regarded much the

ii SOCIAL SIGNIFICANCE OF MYTH-MAKING 103

same as a physical evil spreading from one person to another,
until it contaminates the whole society. So that, if an avenging
power does arise, it will be to castigate society as a whole,
without making its weight felt only at the spot from which
the evil sprang: the picture of Justice pursuing the criminal
is relatively modern, and we have simplified matters too much
in showing the individual checked, on the verge of breaking
the social bond, by the religious fear of a punishment which
would fall on him alone, ft is none the less true that things
tend to assume this form, and that they assume it more and
more distinctly as religion, determining its own features,
becomes more frankly mythological. The myth will indeed
always bear traces of its origin; it will never clearly distinguish
between the physical order and the moral or social order,
between intentional orderliness due to the obedience of all to
a law and the orderliness manifested in the course of nature.
Themis, goddess of human justice, is the mother of the
Seasons ('lpai) and of A/*??, who represents the physical
law as well as the moral law. Even to-day we have hardly rid
ourselves of this confusion; traces of it linger in our language.
Morals and morality, regularity and regulation, uniformity
de facto and uniformity dejure are in each case both expressed
in much the same way. Does not the word "order" signify
both system and command?

Lastly, we spoke of a god, arising tp prohibit, to prevent, to
punish* That means presumably that the moral force, from
which the resistance springs, and even, if need be, the venge-
ance, is incarnated in a person. That it thus tends naturally
to assume, in the eyes of man, a human form, there is no
doubt. But if mythology is a product of nature, it is a late
product, like flower-bearing plants, and the beginnings of
religion were more modest. A careful study of what occurs in
our consciousness shows us that an intentional resistance, and
even a vengeance, at first strike us as self-sufficient entities;
for them to be clothed with a definite body, like that of a
vigilant and avenging deity, is already a luxury; the myth-
making function of the mind doubtless only works with
artistic pleasure on conceptions thus arrayed, but it does not

104 STATIC RELIGION CH.

form them all at once; it begins by taking them in their
nakedness. We shall have to emphasize this point, which has
not sufficiently engaged the attention of psychologists. There
is no proof that the. child who knocks his head against the
table, and hits back, looks on the table as a person. Indeed
this interpretation is far from being accepted by all psychol-
ogists to-day. But in this case, after attributing too much to
mythological explanation, they now do not go far enough
when they suppose that the child simply gives way to an
impulse to hit, caused by anger. The truth is that between the
identification of the table with a person and the perception
of the table as an inanimate object, there lies an intermediate
representation which is neither that of a thing nor of a
person; it is the image of the act accomplished by the table
in striking, or, better still, the image of the act of striking,
bringing with it like luggage borne on its back the table
which stands behind. The act of striking is an element of
personality, but not yet a complete personality. The fencer
who sees the button of his adversary's foil coming at him
knows that it is the movement of the point which has drawn
the foil forward, that it is the foil that has drawn the arm for-
ward, that it is the arm that stretched out the body by stretch-
ing out itself: he can only lunge properly, and give a direct
thrust instantaneously, from the time he feels things in this
order. To reverse their order is to reconstruct, and so to
philosophize: in any case it is bringing to light the implicit,
instead of being content with what action pure and simple
requires, with what is directly perceived and really primitive.
When we read a signboard "Trespassers will be prosecuted",
we begin by perceiving the prohibition; it stands out clearly; it
is only behind it, in the shadow, that we have a vision of the
constable lying in wait to report us. In the same way, the-
the social order first stand out, just
e they are already more than mere words;

they resist* and press, and push;, hut the divinity wJxo forbids,
and whojyas screened by them, will only appear later, as the
work of the myth-making function becomes complete. We
must not be surprised, therefore, if we meet with prohibitions

ii FRAGMENTARY PERSONIFICATION 105

in uncivilized communities, which are semi-physical, semi-
moral restraints on certain individual acts; tl^object ^occupy-
ing J;l^jGfi&&^ a JkjjJL ^ res * st ? n ?? w ^ ke ca N e ^ Boffi
"sacred" and "4aagesau&"r once these two definite ideas are
constituted, and when the distinction is clearly made between
a physical force of repulsion and a moral inhibition; up till
then, it possesses the two properties fused into one; it istaboo^
to use the Polynesian term made familiar to us by tKe science
of religions. Did primitive humanity conceive the taboo in
the same way as the "primitive races'* of to-day? Let us first
agree on the meaning of the words. There would be no such
thing as primitive humanity, if the species had been formed
by imperceptible transitions; at no given moment would man
have emerged from the animal state; but this is an arbitrary
hypothesis, which comes up against so many improbabilities
and rests on such ambiguities that we believe it to be unten-
able; 1 by following the clue of facts and analogies, we are far
more likely to arrive at a discontinuous evolution, proceeding by
bounds, obtaining at each stopping-place a combination, per-
fect of its kind, like the shifting figures that follow one another
in a kaleidoscope; there is then a type of primitive humanity,
even though the human species may have been formed by
various leaps converging from various points and not all
coming equally near to a realization of the type. On the other
hand, the primitive soul would escape us entirely to-day if
there had been hereditary transmission of acquired habits.
Our moral nature, taken in its raw state, would then differ
radically from that of our remotest ancestors. But again it is
under the influence of preconceived ideas, and to satisfy the
demands of a theory, that one speaks of hereditary habit and,
above all, that one believes in a transmission regular enough
to bring about a transformation. The truth is that, if civiliza-
tion has profoundly modified man, it is by accumulating in
his social surroundings, as in a reservoir, the habits and
knowledge which society pours into the individual at each
new generation. Scratch the, surface, aboiish-^verything we
owe to an education which is perpetual and unceasing, and

See Creative Evolution, chaps, i. and ii.

106 STATIC RELIGION CH.

you find in the depth of our nature primitive humanity, or
something very near it. Are the "primitive" peoples we
pfcserve to-day the image of that humanity? It is hardly prob-
Jable, since nature is. overlaid, in their case as well, by a layer
iof habits which the social surroundings have preserved in
order to deposit them in each individual. But there is reason
to believe that this JtayerJ_s not so thick as in civilized man,
and that it allows nature to show more clearly through it.
The multiplication of habits throughout the ages must in
their case have occurred in a different way, along the surface,
by passing from one of them to another simply because
they looked alike, or on account of some other accidental
cause, whereas the progress of technical skill, of knowledge,
in a word of civilization, takes place over fairly considerable
periods in one and the same direction, vertically, by super-
imposed or anastomotic variations, resulting therefore in deep
transformations, and not merely in surface complications.
Hence, it is easy to see how far we may regard as absolutely
primitive the notion of taboo which we find among the
"primitive" peoples of to-day. Even supposing that it some-
how appeared in a humanity fresh from the hands of nature,
it did not apply to the same things as now, nor, probably, to
so many things. Each taboo must have been a prohibition in
which society had a well-defined interest. Irrational from the
point of view of the individual, since it suddenly checked
intelligent activity without resorting to intelligence, it was
rational inasmuch as it was in the interests of the society
and the species. Hence, sexual intercourse, for example,
was satisfactorily regulated by taboos. But precisely because
no appeal had been made to individual intelligence, because
the object was even to thwart it, intelligence, seizing upon
the idea of taboo, must have extended it arbitrarily in all
directions, by chance association of ideas, without troubling
about what we might calljthe.,Qriginal intention of nature.
Thus, admitting that taboo has always been what it is to-day,
it probably did not apply to so many things, nor lead to such
absurd consequences. But has it kept its original form? The
intelUgenc^ol/'prinutiys" peoples is not essentially different

ii ASSURANCE AGAINST DISORGANIZATION 107

from our own; it must have a tendency, like ours, to convert
the dynamic into the static, and solidify actions into things.
We may presume then that, under its influence, the prohibi-
tions have taken up their abode inside the things to which
they applied: they were nothing but resistances opposed to
tendencies, but, as a tendency has for the most part an
object, it was from the object, and as if dwelling within it,
that the resistance appeared to come, having become in this
way an attribute of its substance. In stagnant societies this
solidification is an accomplished fact. It was perhaps less
complete, it was in any case temporary, in what one might
call mobile societies, where intelligence was bound in the end
to perceive behind the prohibition a person.

We have been dealing with the first function of religion,
that jwhich directly_concernsjocial pregfirv^tmn Now let us
come to the other. Once more we shall see it working for the
good of society, but indirectly, by stimulating and guiding
individual activities. We shall indeed find its work more
complex, and we shall be obliged to catalogue the forms it
takes. But there is no danger of losing our way in this search,
for we have the clue in our hands. We must always remember
that the sphere of life is essentially that of instinct; that along
a certain line of evolution instinct has to some extent made
room for intelligence; that this may lead to a disturbance of
life; that nature, in such circumstances, has no other resource
than to set up intelligence against intelligence. The intellec-
tual representation which thus restores the balance to nature's
advantage is of a religious order. Let us take the simplest case
first.

Animals do not know that they must die. Doubtless some
of them make the distinction between the living and the
dead; we mean by this that the sight of a dead creature and
of a living one does not produce in them the same reactions,
the same movements, the same attitudes; this does not imply
that they have a general idea of death, any more than they
have of life, or any general idea whatsoever, at least in the
sense of a mental picture and not simply a movement of the
body. An animal will "sham dead" to escape from an enemy;

io8 STATIC RELIGION CH.

but it is we who define his attitude thus; so far as he is con-
cerned, he does not stir because he feels that by moving
he would excite or again attract attention and invite attack,
because movement evokes movement. Cases of animal suicide
have been reported, it is true: even admitting this as an actual
fact, there is a vast difference between doing what must
result in death and knowing that the result is going to be
death; to perform an action, even one that is well-contrived
and appropriate, is one thing, to forecast the outcome of it
is another. But even suppose that an animal has the notion of
death. He certainly does not realize that he is bound to die,
that he must die a natural death if he does not die a violent
one. This would require a series of observations of other
animals, then a synthesis, lastly, a process of generalization
which already savours of science. Even supposing that the
animal could contrive to make any such effort, it would be
for something worth while; now nothing could be more useless
to him than to know that he must die. It is more to his interest
not to know it. But man knows he will die. All other living
creatures, clinging to life, are simply carried along by its im-
petus. Although they do not contemplate themselves sub specie
aeterniy their confidence, being a perpetual encroachment of the
present on the future, is the translation of such contempla-
tion into feeling. But with man reflexion appears, and conse-
quently the faculty of observing with no view to immediate
utility, of comparing with one another observations that are
temporarily disinterested, in short, of deducing and general-
izing. Seeing that every living thing about him ends by dying,
he is convinced that he will die too. Nature, in endowing
him with intelligence, must inevitably lead him to this con-
clusion. But this conviction cuts athwart the forward move-
ment of nature. If the impetus of life turns all other living
creatures away from the image of death, so the thought of
death must slow down in man the movement of life. It may
later find its appropriate setting in a philosophy which ends
in raising humanity above its own level and increasing its
powers of action. But it is at first a depressing thought, and
would be more depressing still, if man, while certain that he

ii ASSURANCE AGAINST DEPRESSION 109

must die, were not ignorant of the date of his death. Death
is indeed bound to come, but as we are constantly becoming
aware that it does not come, the continued repetition of the
negative experience condenses into a barely conscious doubt,
which diminishes the effect of the reasoned certainty. It is
none the less true that the certainty of death, arising at the
same time as reflexion in a world of living creatures con-
structed to think only of living, runs counter to nature's
intention. Nature, then, looks as if it is going to stumble over
the obstacle which she has placed on her own path. But she
recovers herself at once. To the idea of inevitable death she
opposes the image of a continuation of life after death; this
image, flung by her into the field of intelligence, where the
idea of death has just become installed, straightens every-
thing out again. 1 This neutralizing of the idea by the image
simply expresses the equilibrium of nature, saving herself
from slipping. We are therefore again confronted here with
that particular interplay of images and ideas which we found ,
characteristic of religion in its beginnings. Looked at from
this second standpoint, religion is a defensive reaction of nature
against the representation , by intelligence, of the inevitability
of death.

In this reaction society is as much concerned as the
individual. Not only because it profits from the individual
effort, and because this effort has a more far-reaching effect
when the idea of an ending does not intervene to thwart its
impetus, but also and above all because society itself needs
stability and duration. A society already civilized is supported
by laws, by institutions, even by buildings constructed to
defy the ravages of time; but punitive societies. are simply
"built up of human beings": what would become of their
authority if people did not believe in the enduring character of
the individualities of which they are composed? It is therefore
essential that the dead should remain present. Ancestor-

1 It goes without saying that the image is hallucinatory only in the
shape it assumes in the eyes of primitive man. As regards the general
question of survival, we have stated our ideas in former works; we shall
recur to them in the present book. See Chapter III. pp. 225 sqq. and
Chapter IV. p. 273-274.

no STATIC RELIGION CH.

worship will come later. The dead will then be closer to
gods. But for this to happen there must be gods, at least in
embryo; there must be a definite form of worship; the mind
must have deliberately turned towards mythology. In its
beginning, intelligence simply sees the dead as mingling with
the living in a society to which they can still do good or ill.
In what form does it conceive their survival? We must not
forget that we are searching in the depths of the soul, by
means of introspection, for the constituent elements of primi-
tive religion. It may be that no single one of these elements
has ever manifested itself externally in an unadulterated state,
that it would have immediately come up against simple
elements, of the same origin, with which it will have amal-
gamated, or it may even have been seized upon, either alone
or with others, to be used as raw material for the never-
ending work of the myth-making function. Thus there are in
existence certain themes, some simple, some complex, sup-
plied by nature; and, on the other hand, we have the countless
variations played upon them by human fancy. To these
themes doubtless may be traced back the fundamental beliefs
met with almost everywhere by the science of religions. As
to the variations on the themes, they are the myths and even
the theoretical conceptions, with their endless diversifications
according to time and place. There is no question but that
the simple theme we have just indicated combines immediately
with others to produce, prior to the myths and the theories,
the primitive representation of the soul. But has it any definite
shape outside this combination? If the question arises, it is
because our present-day idea of a soul living on after the
body overlays the image, which presents itself to the im-
mediate consciousness, of the body able to live on after its
death. Yet this image does exist, and it takes but a slight
effort to recall it. It is nothing more than the visual image of
the body detached from the tactile image. We have got into
the habit of considering the first as inseparable from the
second, as a shadow or effect of the latter. The progress of
knowledge is all in that direction. For contemporary science
the body is essentially what it is to the touch; it has a definite

ii THEMES OF PRACTICAL MYTH-MAKING in

form and dimension, independent of ourselves; it occupies
a given position in space and cannot change it without taking
time to occupy successively the intervening positions; the
visual image of it would in that case be a phenomenon whose
variations we must constantly rectify by recourse to the
tactile image; the latter would be the thing itself, the other
would merely indicate its presence. But the immediate
impression is nothing of the kind. A mind not on its guard
will put the visual image and the tactile image on the same
plane, will attribute to them the same reality, and will
assume ^them to be relatively independent of one another.
The "primitive" man has only to stoop over a pool to see his
body just as it really appears, detached from the tactile body.
Of course the body he can touch is also a body he can see;
this proves that the outer envelope of the body, which con-
stitutes the seen body, can become dual and that one of the
two semblances stays with the tactile body. But the fact
remains that there is a body which is detachable from the one
he can touch, a mere shell of a body, devoid of weight, which
has moved in a trice to the place where he sees it. There is
doubtless nothing about that body to incline us to believe
that it lives on after death. But if we begin by laying down
the principle that there must be something that does live on,
it will obviously be that body and not the other, for the body
we can touch is still present, it lies motionless and speedily
decays, whereas the visible envelope may have slipped away
somewhere or other and remained alive. The idea that men
live on as shades or phantoms is therefore quite natural. It
must have preceded, we believe, the more elaborate idea of
a principle breathing life into the body; this 'breath itself
has gradually become spiritualized into the soul. It is true
that the ghostly envelope of the body seems incapable, by
itself, of exerting a pressure on human events, and yet it
must exert one, since it is the yearning after continued
action that has led to the belief in an after-life. But here a
new element supervenes.

We shall not yet define this other elementary tendency. It
is as natural as the two preceeding ones. It is likewise a

ii2 STATIC RELIGION CH.

defensive reaction of nature. We shall have to be enquiring
whence it comes. For the present we shall only consider what
comes of it. It becomes in the end the representation of a
force diffused throughout the whole of nature and distributed
among individual objects and beings. In the science of
religions this emanation is generally reported to be primitive.
We hear of the Polynesian mana, whose counterpart is found
elsewhere under different names: the wakanda of the Sioux,
the arenda of the Iroquois, the pantang of the Malays, etc.
According to some, the mana is a universal principle of life,
constituting in particular, to use our own language, the sub-
stance of souls. According to others, it is rather a new force
supervening, such as the soul, or indeed anything else, might
well assimilate, but which does not belong essentially to the
soul. Durkheim, who apparently reasons along the first hypo-
thesis, holds that the mana supplies the totemic principle by
which the members of the clan commune together; the soul
is thus regarded as being a direct individualization of the
"totem" and to share in the mana through this agency. It is
not our business to decide between these different inter-
pretations. Speaking generally, we hesitate to consider as
primitive, meaning natural, a notion which we should not
to-day form naturally. We are of the opinion that what was
once primitive has not ceased to be so, even though an effort
of self-scrutiny may be necessary to re-discover it. But in
whatever shape we take this mental image which we are now
considering, we shall have no objection to admitting that the
idea of a source of power upon which animate beings, artd
even a considerable number of inanimate objects, can draw,
is one of the first ideas the mind encounters when following
a certain tendency, a natural and primary one, which we shall
define a little further on. Let us then take this for granted.
Man is now provided with what he will call later a soul.
Will this soul survive the body? There is no reason to suppose
so if we consider the soul alone. There is no reason to believe
that a power such as the mana should last longer than the
body in which it dwells. But if we have started by assuming
the principle that the ghostly form of the body persists, there

n PRIMITIVE THEMES 113

is nothing to prevent our also leaving in it the principle which
endowed the body with the strength to act. The result will
be an active and effective shade capable of influencing
human events. Such seems indeed to be the primitive con-
ception of survival.

The influence thus exerted would not, indeed, be great,
if it were not that the soul-idea unites with the spirit-idea.
This too comes from another natural tendency which we
shall also have to define. Let us take it also for granted and
note that exchanges will occur between the two ideas. The
spirits supposed to be present everywhere in nature would
not so closely resemble the human form if souls were not
already depicted in this shape. On their side, the souls detached
from the body would be without influence on natural pheno-
mena if they were not of the same order as the spirits and
more or less capable of taking their place among them. The
dead are then going to become persons to be reckoned with.
They can do harm. They may do good. They have at their
disposal, up to a certain point, what we call the forces of
nature. In both a literal and a figurative sense they cause the

rain and the fine weather. People will eschew what might

n WH r*i'f**"'* a ''-' v ~ """"~~"- *"*- . - **

irritate them. They will spare no pains to secure their con-
fidence. They will think of countless ways of winning them
6ver, of buying their favour, even of outwitting them. Once
started on this road, there is hardly any absurdity mto wluch
intelligence may not stumble. The myth-making function
\v6rks well enough by itself alone: what will it not do when
it is spurred on by fear and necessity! To avert a danger or
to secure a favour the living are ready to offer anything they
fancy the dead man may want. They will go so far as the
cutting off of heads, if that may be pleasing in his sight.
Missionary stories are full of detailed accounts of such things.
Childish and monstrous indeed, there the list of similar
practices indulged in by human stupidity is interminable.
Looking at them, and at them only, we should be tempted
to abominate humanity. But we must not forget that the
primitives of to-day or of yesterday have lived as many
centuries as we have, have had plenty of time to exaggerate

ii4 STATIC RELIGION CH.

and to aggravate, as it were, the possible irrationalities con-
tained in elementary tendencies, natural enough though they
be. The true primitives were probably more reasonable, if
they kept to the tendency and its immediate effects. Every-
thing changes, and, as we have said above, the change will
take place in breadth if not in depth. There are societies
which progress probably those on whom unfavourable con-
ditions of life have forced a certain effort to live, and which
have then consented, at rare intervals, to increase their effort
in order to follow a pioneer, an inventor, a man of genius.
The change is here an increase of intensity; the direction
remains relatively unchanged; the progress is towards an
ever higher efficiency. There are, on the other hand, societies
that keep to their original level, which is inevitably somewhat
low. As, nevertheless, they do change, there takes place within
them not that intensification which would be a qualitative
progress, but a multiplication or an exaggeration of the
primitive state of things: invention, if we can still use the
word, no longer requires an effort. From a belief answering
to a certain need they have passed to some new belief which
resembles the former outwardly, which accentuates one or
another of its superficial characteristics, but which no longer
serves any purpose. Thenceforth, marking time, they cease-
lessly pile up additions and amplifications. Through the
double effect of repetition and exaggeration the irrational
passes into the realm of the absurd, and the strange into the
realm of the monstrous. These successive extensions must also
have been due to individuals; but here there was no longer any
need for intellectual superiority to invent, or to accept the in-
vention. The logic of absurdity was enough, that logic which
leads the mind ever further and further astray towards wilder
and wilder consequences, when it starts out from a strange idea
without relating it to sources which could explain its strange-
ness and check its proliferation. We have all come across
one of those very united, self-satisfied families, who keep
themselves to themselves, because they are shy or super-
cilious. It is not unusual to notice certain quaint habits among
them, aversions or superstitions, which might become serious

ii ASSURANCE AGAINST THE UNFORESEEABLE 115

if they were to go on fermenting in a closed vessel. Each one
of these singularities has its particular origin. It was some
idea which occurred to one or another of the family, and which
the others have taken on trust. It may be a walk they took
one Sunday and took again the next Sunday, and which then
became a settled thing every Sunday of the year: if they
should have the misfortune to miss it once, goodness knows
what would happen. In order to repeat, to imitate, to follow
blindly, we have only to relax; it is criticism that demands an
effort. Now take a few hundred centuries instead of a few
years; magnify enormously all the little foibles of a family
living in isolation: you will have no difficulty in imagining
what must have occurred in primitive societies which have
remained self-centred and self-satisfied, instead of opening
windows on to the outside world, of dispersing the foul
vapours as they gathered about them, and of making a constant
effort to broaden their horizon.

We have just defined above two essential functions of
religion and, in the course of our analysis, we have met with
primary tendencies which appear to provide an explanation
of the general forms assumed by religion. We now pass to
the study of these general forms, these primary tendencies.
Our method will still remain the same. We postulate a certain
instinctive activity; then, calling into play intelligence, we try
to discover whether it leads to a dangerous disturbance; if it
does, the balance will probably be restored through repre-
sentations evoked by instinct within the disturbing intelli-
gence; if such representations exist, they are primary religious
ideas. For example, the vital impulse knows nothing of death.
But let intelligence spring to life under pressure from this
impulse, and up comes the idea of the inevitability of death:
to restore to life its impetus, an opposing representation will
start up, and from it will emerge the primitive beliefs con-
cerning death. But, though death be the greatest accident of
all, yet to how many other accidents is not life exposed! Does
not the very application of intelligence to life open the door
to the unforeseen and let in the feeling of risk? An animal is
sure of itself. In its case nothing intervenes between aim

n6 STATIC RELIGION CH.

and act. If its prey is there, the animal pounces upon it. If
it is a matter of lying in wait, its waiting is a forestalling of
the act and will form, with the accomplishment of it, an
undivided whole. If the ultimate objective is remote, as in
the case of the bee building the hive, it is an objective of
which the animal is unaware; it only sees the immediate
object, and the leap it takes is exactly co-extensive with
the act it has to accomplish. But it is the very essence of
intelligence to co-ordinate means with a view to a remote
end, and to undertake what it does not feel absolutely sure of
carrying out. Between what it does and the result it wants to
attain there is more often than not,^.both in space and in
time, an interval which leaves ample room for accident. It
begins, and, to enable it to finish, circumstances, as we say,
must lend their aid. It may indeed be fully conscious of this
margin of the unexpected. The savage, when shooting his
arrow, does not know if it will strike the object at which he
aimed: we have not here, as in the case of the animal with its
prey, continuity between gesture and result; a gap appears,
exposed to accident, attracting the unexpected. Doubtless
this should not be so in theory. Intelligence is constituted to act
mechanically on matter; it thus postulates a universal mechan-
ism and conceives virtually a complete science which would
make it possible to foresee, at the very instant when the action
is launched, everything it is likely to come up against before
reaching its goal. But it is part of the very essence of such
an ideal that it is never fulfilled, and that it can at the utmost
serve as a stimulus to the work of the intelligence. In fact,
human intelligence must confine itself to very limited action
on a material about which it knows very little. But the vital
impulse is there, brooking no delay, admitting no obstacle.
It ignores the accidental, the unforeseen, in a word the in-
determinate which lies along its path; it advances by leaps
and bounds, seeing only the end in view, devouring the space
between. And yet it is necessary that intelligence should have
cognizance of this anticipation. A representation will accord-
ingly arise, that of favourable powers overriding or occupying
the place of the natural causes and continuing into actions or-

ii ASSURANCE AGAINST THE UNFORESEEABLE 117

dained by them, in accordance with our wishes, the enterprise
started on natural lines. We have set a mechanism going,
this is the beginning; we shall find a mechanism again in the
realization of the desired effect, that is the end: between the
two there must have been inserted a supra-mechanical
guarantee of success. True, if we thus imagine friendly
powers interested in our success, the logic of intelligence will
require that we postulate antagonistic causes, unfriendly
powers, to explain our failure. This last belief will, after all,
have its practical utility; it will indirectly stimulate our
activity by inducing us to be circumspect. But this is deriva-
tion, I might almost say decadence. The representation of a
hindering force is scarcely a later development than that of a
helping force; if the latter is natural, the former is its im-
mediate consequence; but it is bound to proliferate, above
all in stagnant societies such as those which we now call
primitive, where beliefs multiply indefinitely by means of
analogies without any regard for their origin. The vital
impulse is optimistic. All the religious representations
which here arise directly from it might then be defined in
the same way: they are defensive reactions of nature against
the representation, by the intelligence, of a depressing margin
of the unexpected between the initiative taken and the effect
desired.

Any one of us can try the experiment if he pleases; he will
see superstitions start up before his very eyes from the will
to win. Stake a sum of money on a number at roulette and
wait till the ball is near the end of its gyrations; just as it is
perhaps coming, in spite of all its hesitations, to the number
you have chosen, your hand goes out to push it, and then to
stop it; here it is your own will, projected outside of yourself,
which is to fill up the gap between the decision it has taken
and the result it expects, thus eliminating chance. Now go
regularly to the gaming rooms, let habit take the lead, your
hand soon gives up its movement; your will shrinks back into
its place; but, as it retires, an entity slips in, emanating from
it and delegated by it: this is luck, a transfiguration of the will
to win. Luck is not a complete personality; it requires more

ii8 STATIC RELIGION CH.

than this to make a divinity. But it has certain elements of
divinity, just enough to make you rely on it.

It is to some such power as this that the savage appeals in
order that his arrow may reach its mark. Skip over the stages
of a long evolution: you will come to the tutelary gods of the
city, whose function is to bring victory to its warriors.

But note that in all cases it is by rational means, it is by
complying with mechanical sequences of cause and effect that
things are set going. Wejjegin by^ doing what depends on
Qjirselyes; it isjonly when we feel that it no longer lies with us
to help ourselves that we have recourse to extra-mechanical
power, even if at the outset, since we believed it present,
we invoked its assistance: we in no wise imagine we are
fKefeBy excused from taking action. But what might well
mislead the psychologist here is the fact that the second
causality is the only one we mention. We say nothing about
the first, because it is taken for granted. It governs the acts
we accomplish with matter as our instrument; we act and
live the belief that we have in it; what would be the use of
translating it into words and making the idea explicit? This
would only have value if we already had a science capable of
using it to advantage. But of the second causality it is worth
while to think, because we find in it at least an encouragement
and an incentive. Were science to supply the uncivilized man
with a contrivance ensuring to him the mathematical certainty
of hitting the mark, he would abide by that mechanical
causality (supposing,of course, that he could instantly do away
with inveterate habits of thought). In the absence of that
science, his action gets all there is to be got out of mechanical
causality, since he draws his bow and takes his aim; but his
thought inclines rather towards the extra-mechanical cause
which is to direct the arrow where it should go, because,
failing the weapon which would make him sure of hitting
the mark, his faith in this causality will give him the self-
confidence which enables him to take better aim.

Human activity operates among events on which it has a
certain influence, but on which it is also dependent. These
events are to some extent foreseeable, and, to a greater

ii ON CHANCE 119

extent, unforeseeable. Since our science is constantly extend-
ing the field of our prevision, we conceive it as ending in a
perfect science in which the unforeseeable would cease to
exist. This is why, to the reflective thought of a civilized man
(we shall see that the case does not apply to his spontaneous
representations), the same mechanical concatenation of cause
and effect with which he comes in contact when dealing with
things must extend to the whole universe. He does not admit
that the system of explanation which is appropriate to physical
events over which he has some control ought to make room,
when he ventures further, for an entirely different system,
namely the system he applies in social life when he attributes
to good or bad, friendly or hostile intentions the behaviour
of other men towards him. If he does so, it is unwittingly; he
would not own to it. But the uncivilized man, who has at his
disposal nothing but an inelastic science exactly proportionate
to the action he exerts on matter, cannot project into the
realm of the unforeseeable an expectant science capable of
embracing it completely and at once opening up wide vistas to
his ambition. Rather than lose heart, he extends to this realm
the system of explanation he uses in his intercourse with other
men; he will expect to meet there with friendly forces, he will
also think himself exposed to malignant influences; in any case
he will not be dealing with a world completely alien to him.
True, if good and evil genii are to preside over the successive
phases of the operation he performs on matter, they will there-
by appear to have exerted an influence over that action from the
very beginning. So our individual will speak as though he in
no way relied, even for that part of the operation which is his
own doing, upon the mechanical sequence of cause and effect.
But if he did not, in this case, believe in a mechanical sequence,
we should not see him, as soon as he acts, do exactly what is
necessary to set things going mechanically. Now, whether
we are dealing with savages or with civilized people, if we
want really to know what is in a man's mind, we must refer
to what he does and not to what he says.

In his extremely interesting and instructive books on
"primitive mentality", M. Levy-Bruhl emphasizes the indif-

120 STATIC RELIGION CH.

ference of this mentality to proximate or physical causes, the
fact that it immediately turns to "mystic causes". "Our daily
activity", he says, "implies unruffled, perfect confidence in the
invariability of natural 4aws. The attitude of mind in primitive
man is very different. To him the nature amid which he lives
presents itself under an entirely different aspect. All things
and all creatures therein are involved in a network of mystic
participations and exclusions". 1 And a little further on: "The
variable element in collective representations is the occult
force to which the illness or the death which has occurred is
attributed: now a witch-doctor is the culprit, now the spirit
of a dead man, now more or less definite or individualized
forces . . . ; the element which remains recognizable, we might
almost say identical, is the pre-established link between ill-
ness and death, on the one hand, and an invisible power, on
the other". 2 The author brings various confirmatory reports
by missionaries and travellers to support this idea, and quotes
the most curious examples.

But one point strikes us at once: namely, that in all the
cases instanced, the effect reported, which is attributed by
primitive man to an occult cause, is an event concerning man,
more particularly an accident to a man, more specifically
still a man's death or illness. There is never any question of
action by the inanimate on the inanimate (save in cases of a
phenomenon, meteorological or other, affecting, so to speak,
man's interests). We are not told that the primitive man who
sees a tree bending in the wind or the shingle rolled up by a
wave, or even the dust raised by his foot, imagines the inter-
vention of anything more than what we call mechanical
causality. The constant relation between the antecedent and
the consequent, both of which he perceives, cannot fail to
impress him: it satisfies him in this case, and, so far as we
know, he does not here superimpose, much less substitute, a
"mystic" causality. Let us go further, leaving aside those
physical facts of which primitive man is an impassive spec-
tator: can we not say of him also, that his "daily activity

1 La Mentality primitive (Paris, 1922), pp. 17, 18.
2 Ibid., p. 24.

ii ON CHANCE 121

implies perfect confidence in the invariability of natural laws"?
Without this confidence, he would not rely on the current of
the river to carry his canoe, nor on the bending of his bow to
shoot his arrow, on his hatchet to cut into the trunk, on his
teeth to bite, on his legs to walk. It is possible that he does
not explicitly picture this natural causality to himself; he has
no interest in doing so, being neither a physicist nor a philos-
opher; but he has faith in it and bases his activity upon it.
Let us go further still. When the primitive man turns to a
mystic cause for the explanation of death, illness or any other
accident, what exactly is the process that he goes through?
He sees, for instance, that a man has been killed by a frag-
ment of rock dislodged during a gale. Does he deny that the
rock was already split, that the wind loosened the stone, that
the blow cracked the skull? Obviously not. He notes, as we do,
the operation of these proximate causes. Why then does he
bring in a " mystic cause", such as the will of a spirit or witch-
doctor, to set it up as the principal cause? Let us look closer:
we shall see that what the primitive man explains here by a
"supernatural" cause is not the physical effect, it is its human
significance, it is its importance to man, and more especially
to a particular man, the one who was crushed by the stone.
There is nothing illogical, consequently nothing "prelogical"
or even anything which evinces an "imperviousness to ex-
perience", in the belief that a cause should be proportionate
to its effect, that, once having admitted the crack in the rock,
the direction and force of the wind purely physical things
which take no account of humanity there remains to be
explained this fact, so momentous to us, the death of a man.
The effect is contained pre-eminently in the cause, as the old
philosophers used to put it; and if the effect has a considerable
human significance, the cause must have at least an equal
significance; it is in any case of the same order: it is an
intention. That the scientific habit of the mind breaks it of
this manner of reasoning is beyond doubt. But it is a natural
one; it lingers on in civilized man, and manifests itself every
time the opposing force does not intervene. We drew atten-
tion to the fact that the gambler, placing his stakes on a

I

122 STATIC RELIGION CH.

number at roulette, will attribute his success or failure to good
or bad luck, that is to say to a favourable or unfavourable
intention. This will not hinder him from explaining by natural
causes everything that occurs between the moment of putting
on his money and the moment when the ball stops; but to the
mechanical causality he will superadd, at the end of the
process, a semi- voluntary choice that may serve as a counter-
part to his own: thus the final effect will be of the same
importance and the same order as the first cause, which was
also a choice. And we grasp the practical origin of this very
logical reasoning when we see the gambler make a movement
with his hand as though to stop the ball: he is epitomizing his
will to win, and the resistance to this will, in the form of good
or bad luck, in order to feel the presence of a hostile or friendly
power, and thus give its full interest to the game. But more
striking still is the resemblance between the mentality of the
civilized and of the primitive man when dealing with facts
such as those we have just had in view: death, illness, serious
accident. An officer who took part in the Great War told us
he always noticed that the men dreaded the bullets more than
the shells, although artillery-fire was far more deadly. The
reason is that with bullets we feel we are aimed at; and each of
us, in spite of himself, reasons as follows: "To produce the
effect, which would mean so much to me, of death or a
serious wound, there must be a cause of equal importance,
there must be intent". A soldier who, as it happened, had
been hit by a splinter from a shell, told us that his first impulse
had been to exclaim: "How silly!" That this fragment of
shell, projected by a purely mechanical cause, and which
might just as well have struck anybody, or nobody, should
nevertheless have come and struck him, him and not some-
body else, appeared to his natural intelligence illogical. By
introducing the idea of "bad luck", he would have demon-
strated more clearly still the kinship of this spontaneous
intelligence with the primitive mentality. A representation
rich in matter, like the idea of a witch-doctor or a spirit,
must doubtless relinquish the greater part of its content to
become the notion of "bad luck"; yet it subsists, it is not

ii ON CHANCE 123

completely emptied; consequently the two mentalities are not
so widely different from each other.

The extremely varied examples of "primitive mentality"
which M. Levy-Bruhl has accumulated in his works can be
grouped under a certain number of headings. The most
numerous are those which show, according to the author,
that primitive man obstinately refuses to admit the existence
of chance. If a stone falls and crushes a passer-by, it was an
evil spirit that dislodged it: there is no chance about it. If a
man is dragged out of his canoe by an alligator, it is
because he was bewitched: there is no chance about it. If a
warrior is killed or wounded by lance-thrust, it is because he
was not in a state to parry the blow, a spell has been cast upon
him: there is no chance about it. 1 The formula recurs so often
in M. Levy-Bruhl's writings that it may be considered as
summing up one of the main characteristics of primitive
mentality. But, to that eminent philosopher we shall say, when
you reproach primitive man with not believing in chance,
or at least when you state it to be a characteristic trait of his
mentality that he does not believe in it, are you not admitting
the existence of chance, and in admitting it are you quite
sure that you are not relapsing into that primitive mentality
you criticize, which at all events you are at great pains to
distinguish radically from your own? I don't mean, of course,
that you make of chance an active force. But if it were for
you a mere nothing, you would not mention it. You would
consider the word as non-existent, as well as the thing itself.
But the word exists, and you use it, and it stands for some-
thing to you, as indeed it does to all of us. Let us ask ourselves
what it really represents. A huge tile, wrenched off by the
wind, falls and kills a passer-by. We say it was by chance.
Should we say the same if the tile had merely crashed on to
the ground? Perhaps, but it would then be because we were
vaguely thinking of a man who might have been there, or
because, for some reason or other, that particular spot on
the pavement was of special interest to us, so that the tile

1 See in particular La MentaliU primitive, pp. 28, 36, 45, etc. cf. Les
Fonctions mentales dans les sorit6s inffrieures, p. 73.

124 STATIC KJfcJLrlLrlUJN CH.

seemed to have specially selected it to fall upon. In both cases
chance intervenes only because some human interest is at
stake, and because things happened as though man had been
taken into account, either with a view of doing him a service,
or more likely with the intention of doing him an injury. 1 Think
only of the wind wrenching off the tile, of the tile falling on
the pavement, of the crash of the tile on the ground: you see
nothing but mechanism, the element of chance vanishes. For
it to intervene it is indispensable that, the effect having a
human significance, this significance should react upon the
cause and colour it, so to speak, with humanity. Chance is
then mechanism behaving as though possessing an intention.
It may perhaps be said that precisely because we use the word
when things occur as if there has been intention, we do not
suppose that there has been real intention, we are recognizing,
on the contrary, that everything is capable of mechanical ex-
planation. And this would be very true if we were dealing with
nothing but reflective, fully conscious thought. But underlying
it is a spontaneous, semi-conscious thought, which super-
imposes on the mechanical sequence of cause and effect some-
thing totally different, not indeed to account for the falling of
the tile, but to explain why its falling should coincide with the
passing beneath it of a man, why it should have chosen just
that very moment to fall. The element of choice or intention
is as restricted as possible; it recedes as reflexion tries to grasp
it; it is elusive, nay, evanescent, but if it were non-existent we
should speak only of mechanism, there would be no question
of chance. Chance is therefore an intention emptied of its
content. It is nothing more than a mere shadow, but the shape
is there even if the matter is not. Have we here one of those
representations which we call "truly primitive", formed spon-
taneously by humanity in obedience to a natural tendency?
Not quite. However spontaneous it may be, the idea of chance
only reaches our consciousness after having first passed
through the layer of accumulated experiences which society

1 We developed this conception of chance in a course of lectures delivered
at the College de France in 1898, in connection with the Ilcpl
of Alexander of Aphrodisia.

ii ON CHANCE 125

deposits within us from the day it first teaches us to speak.
It is in the course of this passage that it becomes emptied,
since an increasingly mechanistic science drives out of it
what purposefulness it contained. We should therefore have
to fill it again, give it a body, if we wanted to reconstitute the
original representation. The phantom of an intention would
then become a living intention. On the other hand, we should
now have to give this living intention far too much content,
over-ballast it with matter, to obtain the malignant or bene-
ficent entities present in the minds of non-civilized men. It
cannot be said too often: these superstitions usually imply a
magnifying, a thickening, in fine an element of caricature. They
denote, more often than not, that the means has become
detached from its end. A belief which begins by being useful,
a spur to the will, has been diverted from the object to which
it owed its existence to new objects where it is no longer of
any use, where it might even become dangerous. Having
multiplied lazily through a superficial imitation of itself, it
will now have the effect of encouraging laziness. Yet we must
not go too far. It is seldom that primitive man feels justified
by that belief in not taking action. The natives of the
Cameroons lay all the blame on the witch-doctor if one of
their tribe is devoured by a crocodile; but M. Levy-Bruhl,
who reports the fact, adds, from the evidence of a traveller,
that crocodiles hardly ever attack man in that country. 1
We may rest assured that where crocodiles are habitually
dangerous the native avoids going into the water just as we
do: here the animal is feared, witchcraft or no. It is none the
less true that to pass from the "primitive mentality" to states of
mind which might well be our own, we have more often than
not to do two things. First we have to make a clean sweep of all
our science. Then we must abandon ourselves to a certain
laziness, turn aside from an explanation which we surmise
to be more reasonable, but which would call for a greater
effort of intelligence and, above all, of will. In many cases
one of these processes is enough; in others we must combine
the two.

1 La Mentalite primitive, p. 38.

126 STATIC RELIGION CH.

Let us take for instance one of the most interesting chapters
in M. Levy-BruhPs books, the one dealing with the first
impressions produced on primitive man by our fire-arms, our
writing, our books, in a word everything we have to give him.
We find this impression disconcerting at first. We should
indeed be tempted to attribute it to a mentality different from
our own. But the more we banish from our minds the science
we have gradually, almost unconsciously, acquired, the more
natural the "primitive" explanation appears. Here we have
people before whom a traveller opens a book, and who are
told that the book gives information. They conclude that the
book speaks, and that by putting it to their ear they will hear
a sound. But to look for anything else in a man unacquainted
with our civilization would be to expect from him an intelli-
gence far greater than that of most of us, greater even than
exceptional intelligence, greater even than genius: it would
mean wanting him to re-invent the art of writing. For if he
could imagine the possibility of depicting words on a sheet of
paper he would possess the principle of alphabetic, or more
generally phonetic, writing; he would straightaway have
reached a point which civilized man has only reached by a
long accumulation of the efforts of a great number of excep-
tional men. Let us not then talk of minds different from our
own. Let us simply say that they are ignorant of what we have
learnt.

There are also, we added, cases where ignorance is coupled
with an aversion to effort. Those would be the ones grouped
by M. L^vy-Bruhl under the title of "ingratitude of the sick".
Primitive men who have been treated by European doctors
are not in any way grateful; nay, more, they expect payment
from the doctor, as if it were they who had done him a service.
But having no notion of our medical science, no idea that it is
a science coupled with an art, seeing moreover that the doctor
is far from always curing his patient, and finally considering
that he certainly gives his time and his trouble, how can they
help thinking that the doctor has some interest, unknown to
them, in what he does? And why, instead of striving to shake
off their ignorance, should they not adopt quite naturally

ii PERSISTENCE OF THE PRIMITIVE MIND 127

the interpretation which first occurs to their minds, and from
which they can profit? I put this question to the author of La
Mentalite primitive, and I shall evoke a recollection, a very
ancient one, though scarcely older than our old friendship.
I was a little boy and I had bad teeth. There was nothing for
it but to take me now and again to the dentist, who at once
showed no mercy to the offending tooth, he pulled it out
relentlessly. Between you and me, it hardly hurt at all, for the
teeth in question would have come out of their own accord;
but I was no sooner seated in the dentist's chair than I set up
a blood-curdling yell, for the principle of the thing. My
family at last found out a way to make me keep quiet. The
dentist, taking care to make a noise about it, would drop a
fifty-centimes piece into the glass from which I was to rinse
out my mouth (asepticism was unknown in those far-off days),
the purchasing-power of this sum being at that time ten
sticks of barley sugar. I must have been six or seven, and was
no stupider than most boys. I was certainly capable of gues-
sing that this was a put-up job between the dentist and my
family to bribe me into silence, and that they conspired
together for my particular good. But it would have needed a
slight effort to think, and I preferred not to make it, perhaps
from laziness, perhaps so as not to change my attitude to-
wards a man against whom my tooth was indeed bared. So I
simply went on not thinking, and the idea I was bound to
form of the dentist then stood out automatically in my mind
in letters of fire. Clearly he was a man who loved drawing
teeth, and he was even ready to pay for this the sum of half a
franc.

But let us close this parenthesis and sum up what we have
said. At the origin of the beliefs we have been studying we
have found a defensive reaction of nature against a dis-
couragement whose source is to be found in intelligence. This
reaction arouses within intelligence itself images and ideas
which hold in check the depressing representation or prevent
it from materializing. Entities then appear which are not
necessarily complete personalities: it suffices that they possess
intentions or even that they coincide with them. Belief then

i 2 8 STATIC RELIGION CH.

means essentially confidence; the original source is not fear,
but an assurance against fear. And, on the other hand, the
belief does not necessarily begin by taking a person as its
object; it is content with a partial anthropomorphism. These
are the two points which strike us when we consider the
natural attitude of man towards a future about which he
thinks, precisely because he is intelligent, and at which he
would take fright because of the unforeseeable elements
he finds in it, were he to confine himself to the representation
of it supplied by intelligence alone. But such are also the two
points we note in cases where we are dealing not with the
future but with the present, and where man is the plaything
of forces immeasurably greater than his own strength. Such
are the great catastrophes: an earthquake, a flood, a tornado.
A very old theory attributed the origin of religion to the fear
inspired by nature in such cases. Primus in orbe deos fecit
timor. Science has gone too far in rejecting that entirely; the
emotion felt by a man in the presence of nature certainly
counts for something in the origin of religions. But, we repeat,
religion is less a fear than a reaction against fear, and it is not,
in its beginnings, a belief in deities. It will not be out of place
to put this statement to a double test, which will not only con-
firm our preceding analysis, but will enable us to get a more
precise notion of those entities of which we have said that
they contain an element of personality without being persons.
Out of them may grow the gods of mythology, and it will be
through a process of enrichment. But these entities could, by
a process of impoverishment, as easily yield that impersonal
force which primitive man, we are told, sees underlying all
things. Let us then follow our usual method. Let us ask our
own consciousness, divested of the acquired, restored to its
original simplicity, how it reacts to an aggression of nature.
The observation of one's own self is a very difficult matter
in such a case, owing to the suddenness with which grave
events occur; and indeed the occasions are rare when it can
be done thoroughly. But certain bygone impressions of which
we have only preserved a dim recollection, and which besides
were already superficial and vague at the time, will perhaps

ii PERSISTENCE OF THE PRIMITIVE MIND 129

become more distinct, and assume a clearer shape, if we com-
plete them by the observations made on himself by a master
of psychological science. William James happened to be in
California during the terrible earthquake of April 1906, which
destroyed part of San Francisco. Here is what he wrote on
the subject:

"When I departed from Harvard for Stanford University
last December, almost the last good-bye I got was that of my
old Californian friend B. 'I hope they'll give you a touch of
earthquake while you're there, so that you may also become
acquainted with that Californian institution.'

"Accordingly, when, lying awake at about half-past five on
the morning of April 18 in my little 'flat' on the campus of
Stanford, I felt the bed begin to waggle, my first conscious-
ness was one of gleeful recognition of the nature of the
movement. 'By Jove,' I said to myself, 'here's B.'s old earth-
quake, after all'! And then, as it went crescendo y 'And a jolly
good one it is, too!' I said. . . .

"The thing was over, as I understand the Lick Observatory
to have declared, in forty-eight seconds. To me it felt as if
about that length of time, although I have heard others say
that it seemed to them longer. In my case sensation and
emotion were so strong that little thought, and no reflexion
or volition, were possible in the short time consumed by the
phenomenon.

"The emotion consisted wholly of glee and admiration;
glee* at the vividness which such an abstract idea or verbal
term as 'earthquake' could put on when translated into sen-
sible reality and verified concretely; and admiration at the
way in which the frail little wooden house could hold itself
together in spite of such a shaking. I felt no trace whatever of
fear; it was pure delight and welcome.

" 'Go it', I almost cried aloud, 'and go it stronger? . . .

"As soon as I could think, I discerned retrospectively
certain peculiar ways in which my consciousness had taken
in the phenomenon. These ways were quite spontaneous,
and, so to speak, inevitable and irresistible.

i 3 o STATIC RELIGION CH.

"First, I personified the earthquake as a permanent in-
dividual entity. It was the earthquake of my friend B.'s
augury, which had been lying low and holding itself back
during all the intervening months in order, on that lustrous
April morning, to invade my room and energize the
more intensely and triumphantly. It came, moreover,
directly to me. It stole in behind my back, and once inside
the room had me all to itself, and could manifest itself
convincingly. Animus and intent were never more present
in any human action, nor did any human activity ever
more definitely point back to a living agent as its source
and origin.

"All whom I consulted on the point agreed as to this
feature in their experience. 'It expressed intention', 'It was
vicious', 'It was bent on destruction', 'It wanted to show its
power', or what not. To me it wanted simply to manifest the
full meaning of its name. But what was this 'It'? To some,
apparently, a vague demoniac power; to me an individualized
being, B.'s earthquake, namely.

"One informant interpreted it as the end of the world and
the beginning of the final judgment. This was a lady in San
Francisco Hotel, who did not think of its being an earthquake
till after she had got into the street and someone had ex-
plained it to her. She told me that the theological interpreta-
tion had kept fear from her mind, and made her take the
shaking calmly. For 'science', when the tensions in the earth's
crusts reach the breaking-point and strata fall into an altered
equilibrium, earthquake is simply the collective name of all
the cracks and shakings and disturbances that happen. They
are the earthquake. But for me the earthquake was the cause
of the disturbances, and the perception of it as a living agent
was irresistible. It had an overpowering dramatic convincing-
ness.

"I realize now better than ever how inevitable were men's
earlier mythological versions of such catastrophes, and how
artificial and against the grain of our spontaneous perceiving
are the later habits into which science educates us. It was
simply impossible for untutored men to take earthquakes

n PERSISTENCE OF THE PRIMITIVE MIND 131

into their minds as anything but supernatural warnings or
retributions." 1

The first thing we notice is that William James speaks of
the earthquake as an " individual being"; he notes that he
personified the earthquake "as a permanent individual
entity". But he does not say that there was be it god or
demon an integral personality, capable of a variety of
actions, of which the earthquake was one particular mani-
festation. On the contrary, the entity in question is the
phenomenon itself, regarded as permanent; its manifestation
conveys its whole essence; its unique function is to be an
earthquake; there is a soul, but that soul is simply the intention
pervading the act. 2 If the author tells us that "never did
human activity more definitely point back to a living agent
as its source and origin" he means by this that the intent and
the animus seemed to belong to the earthquake in the same
way as the acts performed by a living agent seem to belong to
the agent while he remains, so to speak, behind them. But
that the living agent is in this case the earthquake itself, that
it possesses no other activity, no other property, that con-
sequently what it is coincides with what it does, is borne
out by the whole account. An entity of this kind, whose
being and appearance are one, which is indistinguishable
from a given act and whose intention is immanent in that
act itself, being but the design and the conscious meaning
of it, is precisely what we have been calling an element of
per'sonality.

There is now another point which cannot fail to strike us.
The San Francisco earthquake was a terrible catastrophe.
But to William James, finding himself suddenly face to face
with the danger, it appears rather as something mischievous
which invites familiarity. "By Jove, here's the old Earth-
quake!" And other people present had the same impression.
The earthquake was "wicked"; it had a mind of its own, "it

1 William James, Memories and Studies, pp. 209-214. Quoted by H. M.
Kallen in Why Religion? (New York), 1927.

8 "Animus and intent were never more present in any human action."

i 3 2 STATIC RELIGION CH.

was bent on destruction". That is just the way we speak of a
young scapegrace with whom we may not have broken entirely.
But the fear that paralyses is the fear born of the thought
that blind and overwhelming forces are about to crush us to
pulp unconsciously. Thus does the material world appear to
intelligence pure and simple. The scientific conception of the
earthquake, alluded to by William James in the last lines, is
likely to be the most dangerous of all, so long as science, which
gives us a clear perception of the peril, has not supplied us
with means of escaping it. To counteract this scientific con-
ception, and more generally the mental picture which it has
endowed with greater precision, there comes a defensive re-
action in the presence of a grave and sudden peril. The dis-
turbances with which we have to deal, each of them entirely
mechanical 'combine into an Event, which resembles a human
being, possibly a "bad lot" but none the less one of us. He is
not an outsider. A certain comradeship is possible between
us. This suffices to dispel fright, or rather to prevent it
arising. Generally speaking, fright has its uses, like all other
feelings. An animal to whom fear is unknown might have no
idea of flying or resisting; it would soon succumb in the
struggle for life. This explains the existence of a feeling such
as fear. It is intelligible too that fear should be in proportion
to danger. But it is a feeling which pulls us up, turns us aside
or pushes us bacC:Tt is essentially inhibitive. When the peril
is great, when the fear is nearing its paroxysm and almost
paralysing, a defensive reaction of nature occurs to counteract
the emotion, which was also natural. Our faculty of feeling
could certainly not be changed, it remains what it was; but
intelligence, impelled by instinct, transforming the situation,
evokes the reassuring image. It lends to the Event a unity
and an individuality which make of it a mischievous, maybe a
malignant being, but still one of ourselves, with something
sociable and human about it.

I ask the reader to search his memory. Unless I am much
mistaken, he will find a confirmation of William James's
analysis. I shall at any rate take the liberty of recalling one or
two recollections of my own. The first goes back to the far-off

ii PERSISTENCE OF THE PRIMITIVE MIND 133

days, since I was very young at the time and went in for
sports, particularly riding. Now one fine day, having just
encountered on the road that most fantastic of apparitions, a
cyclist perched on a tall velocipede, my horse took fright and
bolted. That this might happen, that in such cases there were
certain things I should do, or at least try to do, I knew as
well as any pupil in the riding school. But I had never thought
of the possibility otherwise than in an abstract form. That the
accident should actually occur, at a given point in time and
space, that it should happen to me rather than to someone
else, struck me as implying a preference for me personally.
Who then had chosen me? It was not the horse. It was no
complete being, whatever it was, good or evil genius. It was
the occurrence itself, an individual with no body of its own,
for it was nothing but a combination of circumstances, but
it had a soul, a very elementary one, hardly distinguishable
from the intention apparently manifested by circumstances.
It followed me in my wild gallop, mischievously watching to
see how I should manage. And my. one idea was to show it
what I could do. If I felt no fear, it was precisely because my
whole mind was centred on this one idea; and also, perhaps,
because the malice of my strange companion did not preclude
^"certain good fellowship. I have often thought of this little
incident, and said to myself that nature could not have
conceived any better psychical mechanism than this, if she
intended, while endowing us with fear as a salutary emotion,
to preserve us from it in cases where we had best not give
way to it.

I have just cited a case where the "good fellowship" nature
of the Accident is the most striking thing about it. Here is
another case, which perhaps brings out more distinctly still
its unity, its individuality, the clearness with which it carves
itself out a place in the continuity of the real. While still a
boy, in 1871, on the morrow of the Franco-Prussian War, I
had, like all people of my generation, considered another war
to be imminent during the twelve or fifteen years that followed.
Later on that war appeared as at once probable and impos-
sible: a complex and contradictory idea, which lasted right

i 3 4 STATIC RELIGION CH.

down to the fatal day. Indeed it called up no image to our
minds, beyond its verbal expression. It kept its abstract
character right down to those terrible hours when the conflict
became obviously inevitable, down to the very last minute,
while we were still hoping against hope. But when, on
August 4, 1914, I opened the Matin newspaper and read in
great headlines: "Germany Declares War on France", I sud-
denly felt an invisible presence which all the past had prepared
and foretold, as a shadow may precede the body that casts it.
It was as though some creature of legend, having escaped
from the book in which its story was told, had quietly taken
possession of the room. True, I was not dealing with a com-
plete personality. There was only enough of it to produce a
certain effect. It had bided its time; and now unceremoni-
ously it took its seat like one of the family. It was to intervene
just at this moment, in this place, that it had been vaguely
interlinked with my life-history. To the staging of this scene,
the room with its furniture, the paper upon the table, myself
standing in front of it, the event pervading every nook and
cranny, forty-three years of vague foreboding had all been
leading up. Horror-struck as I was, and though I felt a war,
even a victorious war, to be a catastrophe, I experienced what
William James expresses, a feeling of admiration for the
smoothness of the transition from the abstract to the con-
crete: who would have thought that so terrible an eventuality
could make its entrance into reality with so little disturbance?
The impression of this facility was predominant above all
else. On reflexion, one realizes that, if nature intended to
oppose a defensive reaction against fear, and prevent a
paralysis of the will brought about by an over-intelligent
representation of a cataclysm entailing endless consequences,
she would create between us and the event simplified, trans-
muted into a rudimentary personality, just this very familiarity
which puts us at our ease, relieves the strain, and disposes us
quite simply to do our duty.

We must search for these fleeting impressions, which are
immediately blotted out by reflexion, if we want to find some
vestige of what may have been felt by our remotest ancestors.

ii PERSISTENCE OF THE PRIMITIVE MIND 135

We should not hesitate to do so, if we were not imbued with
the preconceived idea that the moral and intellectual acquisi-
tions of humanity, incorporated in the substance of individual
organisms, have come down to us through heredity. In that
case we should be born totally different from what our
ancestors were. But heredity does not possess this virtue. It
cannot make natural tendencies out of habits contracted from
generation to generation. If it had any hold on habit, it would
have a very slight one, accidentally and exceptionally; it has
probably none at all. The natural is, then, to-day what it has
always been. True, things happen as if it had been trans-
formed, since all that society has acquired overlays it, since
society moulds individuals by means of an education that
goes on without a break from the hour of their birth. But let
a sudden shock paralyse these superficial activities, let the
light in which they work be extinguished for a moment: at
once the natural reappears, like the changeless star in the
night. The psychologist who wants to go back to what is
primitive must seek after these out-of-the-way experiences.
For all that, he will not let go his guiding thread, he will not
forget that nature is utilitarian, and that every instinct has its
function; those instincts which we might call intellectual are
defensive reactions against the exaggeratedly and above all
the prematurely intelligent element in intelligence. But the
two methods will help each other: the one serving rather for
research, the other for verification. It is our pride, a twofold
pride, which generally makes us shy at them. We want man
to be born superior to what he used to be, as if true merit did
not lie in effort, as though a species in which each individual
has to rise above himself by a laborious assimilation of all the
past were not, to say the least, on a par with a species in which
each generation would be raised in its entirety to a higher
level than the preceding ones by the automatic play of
heredity! But there is yet another pride, that of intelligence,
which will not admit its original subordination to biological
necessities. No one would study a cell, a tissue, an organ,
without caring about its function; in the field of psychology
itself, no one would consider he had fully accounted for an

I3 6 STATIC RELIGION CH.

instinct unless he had connected it with some need of the
species; but once you come to intelligence, farewell nature!
farewell life! Intelligence is assumed to be what it is "for no
particular reason, for the fun of the thing". As if it also did not
primarily correspond to vital needs! Its original business is to
resolve problems similar to those resolved by instinct, though
indeed by a very different method, which ensures progress
and which cannot be applied unless it be, in theory, com-
pletely independent of nature. But this independence is
limited in fact: it ceases at the exact moment when intelligence
would defeat its own object by injuring some vital interest.
Intelligence is then inevitably kept under observation by in-
stinct, or rather by life, the common origin of instinct and
intelligence. This is just what we mean when we speak of
intellectual instincts; we are then dealing with representa-
tions formed naturally by intelligence, by way of safeguarding
itself, through certain beliefs, against certain dangers of know-
ledge. Such are then the tendencies, such are the experiences
psychology must bear in mind, if it wants to get back to the
fountain-head.

The study of the uncivilized will be none the less valuable.
We have said, and we cannot repeat it too often: they are as
far from the beginning of things as we are, but they have
invented less. So they have had to apply the same knowledge
in countless different ways; theirs has perforce been a process
of exaggeration, caricature, in a word, distortion, rather than
radical transformation. But whether it be a matter of trans-
formation or one of distortion, the original form subsists,
merely covered over by the acquired; in both cases, therefore,
the psychologist in search of origins will have the same kind
of effort to make, but the road may be shorter in the second
case than in the first. This is what will occur especially when
we come to find similar beliefs among peoples between whom
there can have been no possible communication. These
beliefs are not necessarily primitive, but they have very likely
come straight from one of those fundamental tendencies
which an effort of introspection would enable us to discover
within ourselves. They may then put us in the way of this

ii PERSISTENCE OF THE PRIMITIVE MIND 137

discovery, and guide that introspection which will later serve
to explain them.

We have always to go back to these questions of method
if we do not wish to go astray in our search. At the turning-
point which we have reached we stand particularly in need
of them. For we are dealing with nothing less than the
reactions of man to his perception of things, of events, of the
universe in general. That intelligence is made to utilize
matter, to dominate things, to master events, there is no
doubt. That its power is in direct proportion to its knowledge
is no less certain. But this science is in the beginning very
limited; very small indeed is the portion of the universal
mechanism that it embraces, of the space and time over which
it has control. What about the rest? Left to itself, intelligence
would simply realize its ignorance; man would feel himself
lost in immensity. But instinct is on the watch. To the strictly
scientific knowledge which goes with technical progress, or is
implied in it, instinct adds, for all those things which are
beyond our scope, the belief in powers that are supposed to
take man into account. The universe is thus peopled with
intentions which are, it is true, fleeting and variable; the only
purely mechanical area is supposed to be that within which
we act mechanically. This area expands with the advance
of civilization: the whole universe ends by appearing as a
mechanism to an intelligence which conceives the ideal vision
of a complete science. We have reached this stage, and it
takes, to-day, a vigorous etfort of introspection to rediscover
the original beliefs which our science covers over with all it
knows and hopes to know. But, as soon as we get at them, we
see how they are to be explained by the joint working of in-
telligence and instinct, how they must have corresponded
:o a vital interest. Turning then to uncivilized man, we verify
tfhat we have observed in ourselves: but in his case the belief
s swollen, exaggerated, multiplied: instead of receding, as
t does with civilized man, in the face of the progress of
science, it overflows into the area reserved to mechanical
iction, and overlays activities which ought to preclude it.
This brings us to an essential point. It has been asserted that

138 STATIC RELIGION CH.

religion began as magic. Magic has also been considered as
a forerunner of science. If we confine ourselves to psychology,
as we have done, if we reconstitute, by an effort of intro-
spection, the natural reaction of man to his perception of
things, we find that, while magic and religion are akin, there
is nothing in common between magic and science.

We have indeed just seen that primitive intelligence divides
its experience into two separate parts. There is, on the one
side, that which obeys the action of the hand or the tool, that
which can be foreseen and relied on: this part of the universe
is conceived physically, until such time as it is conceived
mathematically; it appears as a concatenation of causes and
effects, in any case it is treated as such; no matter if this con-
ception be indistinct, or barely conscious; it may never be
expressed; but in order to know what intelligence thinks
implicitly, we need only look at what it does. Then, on the
other hand, there is that part of experience upon which homo
faber feels he has entirely lost his grip. This part is treated no
longer physically, but morally. Since we can exert no power
over it, we hope it will exert some power in our behoof. Thus
nature becomes in such a case impregnated with humanity.
But she will acquire this human quality only as far as is
necessary. In default of power, we must have confidence. For
us to feel comfortable, the event which singles itself out
before our eyes from the mass of reality must appear animated
with a purpose. That will be indeed our natural and original
conviction. But we shall not stop there. It is not enough for
us to have nothing to fear, we would fain have something to
hope for as well. If the event is not utterly devoid of feeling,
can we not manage to influence it? Will it not allow itself to
be convinced or constrained? This will be difficult if it re-
mains what it is, a transient intention, a rudimentary soul;
it would not have personality enough to hearken to our
prayers, it would have too much to be at our beck and call.
But our mind can easily impel it in one direction or the other.
For the pressure of instinct has given rise, within intelli-
gence, to that form of imagination which is the myth-making
function. Myth-making has but to follow its own course in

ii ON MAGIC IN GENERAL 139

order to fashion, out of the elementary personalities looming
up at the outset, gods that assume more and more exalted form
like those of mythology, or deities ever more degraded, such as
mere spirits, or even forces which retain only one property
from their psychological origin, that of not being purely
mechanical, and of complying with our wishes, of bending
to our will. The first and second directions are those of
religion, the third that of magic. Let us begin with the latter.
There has been a great deal of discussion about the notion
of mana which was brought out some years ago by Codrington
in his famous book on the Melanesians, and about its equiv-
alent, or rather something analogous to it, supposed to exist
among other primitives: such as the orenda of the Iroquois,
the wahanda of the Sioux, etc. All these words seem to con-
note a force present throughout nature, a force of which some
if not all things are said to partake in different degrees. From
this to the hypothesis of a primitive philosophy taking form
in the human mind at the very dawn of thought there is but
a step. Some authorities have indeed supposed that the minds
of the non-civilized were obsessed by a vague kind of pan-
theism. But it is very unlikely that humanity starts from such
general and abstract notions. Before any man can philosophize
he must live. Scholars and philosophers are too much inclined
to believe that the mind works in all men as with them, for
the sheer love of thinking. The truth is that its aim is action,
and that, if there really is any philosophy to be found in the
uncivilized man, it is certainly action rather than thought; it
is implied in a whole group of operations which are useful or
considered as such; it only emerges from them, it only ex-
presses itself in words and they are inevitably very vague
for the convenience of action. MM. Hubert and Mauss, in
their very interesting Theorie generate de la magie> have made
out a strong case for the belief in magic being inseparable
from the conception of the mana. According to them it
would appear that this belief derives from that conception.
Is it not just the other way round? It does not strike us as
probable that the representation corresponding to such
terms as mana, orenda, etc., was formed first and that magic

i 4 o STATIC RELIGION CH.

originated thence. Quite the contrary, it is because man
believed in magic, because he practised it, that he must have
represented things to himself in this way: his magic appar-
ently worked, and he did but explain, or rather express, its
success. Now, that he should have begun at once to practise
magic is easy to understand; he realized at once that the
limits of his normal influence over the outside world were
soon reached, and he could not resign himself to going no
further. So he carried on the movement, and, since the
movement could not by itself secure the desired result,
nature must needs take the task in hand. It could only be
so if matter were, so to speak, magnetized, if it turned of its
own accord towards man, to undertake his errands and carry
out his orders. Matter remained none the less amenable, as
we should say to-day, to physical laws; this had to be so, for
the sake of the mechanical hold upon it. But it was, besides,
impregnated with humanity, I mean charged with a force
capable of entering into human designs. Man could turn this
tendency to advantage so as to extend his action further than
physical laws permitted. We can easily convince ourselves
of this if we consider the magical recipes, and the concep-
tions of matter which made it possible to imagine confusedly
that magic could succeed.

The operations have often been described, but as the
applications of certain theoretical principles such as "like
acts on like", "the part stands for the whole", etc. That these
formulae can serve to classify magical processes there is no
doubt. But it in no wise follows that magical operations are
derived from them. If primitive intelligence had begun by
conceiving principles, it would very soon have capitulated
before the evidence of experience, which would have proved
them erroneous. But here again it merely translates into
a conception what was suggested by an instinct. To put it
more clearly, there is a logic of the body, an extension of
desire, which comes into play long before intelligence has
found a conceptual form for it. Take, for instance, a "primi-
tive" man who wants to kill his enemy: that enemy, however,
is far away; it is impossible to get at him. No matter! Our

ii ON MAGIC IN GENERAL 141

man is in a rage; he goes through the motions of pouncing on
the absent man. Once started he goes on to the bitter end;
he squeezes his fingers round the neck of the victim he thinks
he has hold of, or wants to have hold of, and throttles him.
But he knows very well that the result is not complete. He
has done everything that he himself could do: he demands
that things should do the rest. They will not do it mechanic-
ally. They will not yield to a physical necessity, as when our
man stamped on the earth, moved his arms or legs, in a word,
obtained from matter reactions corresponding to his actions.
Therefore he wants matter, not only to be obliged to give
back mechanically what it receives, but also to possess the
faculty of fulfilling desires and obeying orders. There will be
nothing impossible in this if nature already tends of her own
accord to take man into account. It will suffice that the same
compliance shown by certain events should also be found in
things. The latter will then be more or less charged with sub-
missiveness and potency: they will hold at our disposal a
power which yields to the desires of man, and of which man
may avail himself. Words such as mana, wakonda, etc., express
this force, and at the same time the prestige surrounding it. You
will not find the same precise meaning for all of them, if you
are looking for precise meanings, but they all correspond to
the same vague idea. They express that which causes things
to lend themselves to the operations of magic. As to these
operations themselves, we have just determined their nature.
They begin the act which man cannot finish. They go through
the motions which alone could not produce the desired effect,
but which will achieve it, if the man concerned knows how
to prevail upon the goodwill of things.

Magic is then innate in man, being but the outward pro-
jection of a desire which fills the heart. If it has appeared
artificial, if it has been reduced to superficial associations of
ideas, it is because it has been studied in processes which
were especially devised to relieve the magician from putting
his heart and soul into them, and to enable him to obtain the
same result without the same effort. An actor studying his
part really and truly lives the emotion he has to express; he

i 4 2 STATIC RELIGION CH.

notes the gestures and inflections to which it gives rise; later,
when facing the public, he will only produce the inflection and
the gesture, he can afford to dispense with the emotion. It is
the same with magic. The "laws" which have been found for
it tell us nothing of the natural impulse from which it sprang.
They are only a formula for the expedients which laziness has
suggested to the original magic by way of self-imitation.

It arises first of all, we are told, from the fact that "like
begets like". There is no apparent reason why humanity
should begin by positing so abstract and arbitrary a law. But
it is understandable that after having gone instinctively
through the motions of flinging himself on his absent enemy,
after having convinced himself that his anger, projected into
space and conveyed forward by some obliging matter, will
proceed to accomplish the act begun, a man should want to
obtain the same effect without having to work himself up
into the same state. He will therefore go through the process
again in cold blood. That very action, described in his wrath,
which he performed when he thought he was locking his
fingers about his enemy's throat, he will reproduce by means
of a ready-made model, a dummy whose outlines he will
merely have to go over. It is thus that he will practise hoodoo.
The puppet he uses need not even resemble his enemy, since
its only function is to ensure that the act is repeated exactly
as before. Such seems to be the psychological origin of a
principle to be expressed in some such formula as "like is
equivalent to like" or, better still, in more precise terms, "the
static can replace the dynamic when it traces the pattern of
the latter". In this ultimate form, reminiscent of its origin,
the principle would not lend itself to indefinite extension.
But in the first form it permits of the belief that it is possible
to affect a distant object through the intermediary of a near
object bearing the merest superficial resemblance to it. It
need not even be explicitly stated or formulated. Merely
implied in an almost instinctive process, it enables this natural
magic to proliferate indefinitely.

Magic practices are referred to yet other laws: "it is pos-
sible to influence a being or a thing by acting on something

ii ON MAGIC IN GENERAL 143

it has touched", "the part is valid for the whole", etc. But
the psychological origin remains the same. The essential is
always to repeat in tranquillity, with the conviction that it is
efficacious, the act which has given a quasi-hallucinatory
impression of its efficacy when performed in a moment of
excitement. In time of drought, the sorcerer is asked to pro-
duce the rain. If he were actually to put his whole soul into
the task, he would, by an effort of imagination, raise himself
up to the cloud, he would believe that he felt himself cleaving
it asunder, and scattering it in rain-drops. But he will find it
simpler to suppose he has nearly come back to earth again,
and then to pour out a little water; this minute fraction of the
event will produce it in its entirety, if the effort which would
have had to be launched from earth to heaven finds some-
thing to take its place, and if the intermediary matter is more
or less charged as it were with positive or negative elec-
tricity with a semi-physical or semi-moral readiness to serve
or to thwart man. This amounts to saying that there exists a
very simple natural magic, reducible to a small number of
practices. It is reflexion upon these practices, or perhaps the
mere translation into words, which has made it possible for
them to multiply in every direction and to absorb all super-
stitions as well, because the formula always goes beyond the
fact which it expresses.

Magic then seems to us to resolve itself into two elements:
the desire to act on a thing, even on that which is out of reach,
and the idea that things are charged, or can be charged, with
what we should call human fluid. We must revert to the first
point to draw the comparison between magic and science, and
to the second to show the connexion of magic with religion.

That there have been cases where magic has accidentally
been of service to science is not impossible: matter cannot
be manipulated without some benefit accruing from it. But
even then, to utilize an observation or simply to note it,
there must be some propensity for scientific research. Now
the moment such is the case you are turning your back on
magic. It is indeed easy to define science, since it has always
worked in the same direction. It measures and calculates with

144 STATIC RELIGION CH.

a view to anticipation and action. It first supposes, then veri-
fies, that the universe is governed by mathematical laws. In
a word, all progress in science consists in a wider knowledge
and a richer utilization of the universal mechanism. This
progress, moreover, is accomplished by an effort of our intel-
ligence, which is designed to guide our action upon things,
and whose structure must therefore be modelled on the
mathematical framework of the universe. Although we are
called upon to act only on the things about us, and though
such was the primitive intention of the function of intelli-
gence, yet, since the mechanism of the universe is present in
each of its parts, it was absolutely necessary that man should
be born with an intelligence virtually capable of embracing
the whole material world. It is the same with the working of
the mind as with the faculty of sight: the eye too was only
meant to reveal to us objects on which we can act; but just
as nature could only obtain the requisite degree of vision with
an apparatus whose effect goes byond its object (since we can
see the stars, while we have no control over them), in the
same way she necessarily had to give us, along with the faculty
of understanding the matter we have to deal with, a virtual
knowledge of the rest, and the no less virtual power of utiliz-
ing it. True, it is a far cry, in this case, from the virtual to the
actual. All effective progress, in the realm of knowledge as
in that of action, has demanded the persistent effort of one or
several superior men. There was, each time, creation, which
nature had doubtless made possible in that she endowed us
with an intelligence whose form outstrips its matter, but* one
which went, so to speak, beyond what nature had intended.
Man's physical and moral structure seemed indeed to destine
him for a more humble existence. His instinctive resistance
to innovations is a proof. The inertia of humanity has never
fielded, save under the impulsion of genius. In a word, science
demands a two-fold effort, that of a few men to find some new
thing and that of all the others to adopt it and adapt them-
selves to it. A society may be called civilized when you find
n it such a power to lead and willingness to be led. The second
:ondition is indeed more difficult of fulfilment than the first.

n MAGIC AND SCIENCE 145

What was lacking among the uncivilized was probably not
the exceptional man (there seems to be no reason why nature
should not have had always and everywhere such fits of
abstraction) but the chance for such a man to show his
superiority, and the readiness of other men to follow him.
Once a society is already on the road to civilization, the pros-
pect of a mere increase of well-being will doubtless suffice to
overcome its ingrained habits. But to get it on to this road,
to start it into motion the first time, requires a great deal
more: perhaps the menace of extermination, such as that
created by the discovery of a new weapon by an enemy tribe.
Those societies which have remained more or less "primi-
tive" are probably those that have had no neighbours, more
generally still those for whom life has been too easy. They
were not called upon to make the initial effort. Subsequently,
it was too late; the society could not advance, even if it wanted
to, because it was contaminated by the products of its own
laziness. These products are precisely the practices of magic,
at least inasmuch as they are excessive and all-encroaching.
For magic is the reverse of science. So long as the inertia
of the environment does not cause it to proliferate, it has its
function to perform. It temporarily calms the uneasiness of
an intelligence whose form exceeds its substance, which is
vaguely aware of its ignorance and realizes the danger of it,
which divines, outside the very small circle in which action
is sure of its effect, where the immediate future is predictable
and within which therefore science already prevails, a vast
area of the unpredictable such as may well discourage action.
And yet act it must. Magic then steps in, as an immediate
effect of the vital impulse. As man widens his knowledge
through effort, it will gradually recede. Meanwhile, as magic is
apparently successful (for the failure of a magical process can
always be attributed to the success of some counter-magic) it
produces the same moral effect as science. But this is its only
feature in common with science, from which it is separated
by the whole distance between wishing and willing. Far from
paving the way for science, as some have maintained, it has
been the great obstacle against which methodical knowledge

146 STATIC RELIGION CH.

has had to contend. Civilized man is a being in whom in-
cipient science, implicit in the daily round, has been able to
encroach, thanks to an ever-active will, on that magic which
was occupying the rest of the field. Non-civilized man is, on
the contrary, one who, disdaining effort, has allowed magic
to invade the realm of incipient science, to overlay it, and
conceal it, even to the point of making us believe in a primi-
tive mentality devoid of all real science. Moreover, once in
possession, it plays thousands of variations upon its own
themes, being more prolific than science, since its inventions
are pure fantasy and cost no effort. Let there be no talk, then,
of an era of magic followed by an era of science. Let us say
that science and magic are both natural, that they have always
co-existed, that our science is very much more extensive than
that of our remote ancestors, but that the latter must have
been much less given to magic than the non-civilized man of
to-day. We have remained, at bottom, what they were. Driven
back by science, the inclination towards magic still survives,
and bides its time. Let our attention to science relax for one
instant, and magic will at once come rushing back into our
civilized society, just as a desire, repressed in our waking
hours, takes advantage of the lightest sleep to find satisfaction
in a dream.

There remains then the problem of the relationship between
magic and religion. Everything depends, obviously, on the
meaning of this last term. The philosopher studies for the
most part a thing to which common sense has already given
a name. Man may only have got a glimpse of it and that
glimpse may have been deceptive; it may have been jumbled
up with other things, from which it must be isolated. It
may even have been segregated from reality as a whole
merely for convenience of speech, and so not effectively con-
stitute, an entity, lending itself to independent study. Herein
lies the great inferiority of philosophy compared to mathe-
matics and even to natural sciences. Its starting-point must
be the cutting up of reality by speech a division and dis-
tribution which is perhaps entirely relative to the needs of
the city: philosophy too often ignores this origin, and pro-

ii MAGIC AND RELIGION 147

ceeds like a geographer who, in order to discriminate between
the different regions of the globe and indicate the physical
connections between them, should take it into his head to go
by the frontiers established by treaties. In the study we have
undertaken, we have guarded against this danger by passing
directly from the word "religion "and everything it embraces in
virtue of a possibly artificial disgregation of things, to a certain
function of the mind which can be directly observed, without
considering the distribution of the real into concepts corre-
sponding to words. In our analysis of the operations of this
function we have successively rediscovered several of the
meanings given to the word religion. Continuing our study,
we shall find other shades of meaning, and we may add one
or two new ones. It will then be plainly demonstrated that
this time the word embraces a reality: a reality which, it is
true, will somewhat overstep, upwards and downwards, the
limits of the usual significance of the word. But we shall then
grasp it in itself, in its structure and in its principle, as often
happens when we relate to a physiological function, such
as digestion, a great number of facts observed in different
parts of the organism, and even discover thereby new facts.
If we look at the matter from this angle, magic is evidently
part of religion. I mean, of course, the lower type of religion,
the one with which we have been dealing up to now. But
magic, in common with this religion, generally speaking,
represents a precaution of nature to meet certain dangers
encountered by the intelligent being. Now, it is possible to
follow another line, to start from the various ordinary inter-
pretations of the word religion, compare them, and extract
therefrom an average meaning: in this way we shall have
solved a dictionary question rather than a philosophical
problem; but no matter, so long as we realize what we are
about, and do not imagine (a constant illusion of philosophers)
that we have obtained the essence of a thing when we have
agreed upon the conventional meaning of the word. Let us
then set out all the acceptations of the word, like the colours
of the spectrum or the notes in a scale: we shall find, some-
where about the middle, at an equal distance from the two

148 STATIC RELIGION CH.

extremities, the adoration of gods to whom men pray. It
goes without saying that religion thus conceived is opposed
to magic. The latter is essentially selfish, the former admits
of and even demands disinterestedness. The one claims to
compel the compliance of nature, the other implores the
favour of the god. Above all, magic works in an environment
which is semi-physical and semi-moral; the magician, at all
events, is not dealing with a person; whereas on the contrary
it is from the personality of the god that religion draws its
greatest efficacy. Granted that primitive intelligence thinks
it perceives around it, in phenomena and in events, elements
of personality rather than complete personalities, religion, as
we have just understood it, will ultimately reinforce these
elements to the extent of completely personifying them,
whereas magic looks upon them as debased, dissolved, as it
were, in a material world in which their efficacy can be tapped.
Magic and religion, then, go their separate ways, having
started from a common origin, and there can be no question of
deriving religion from magic: they are contemporaneous. It is
understandable, however, that there should be something of
the one hovering round the other, that some magic lingers
in religion, and still more, some religion in magic. We know
that the magician sometimes works through the medium
of spirits, that is to say of being relatively individualized,
but which do not possess the complete personality nor the
eminent dignity of gods. On the other hand, incantation may
partake of both command and prayer.

The history of religions has long regarded the belief in
spirits as primitive and explanatory of all the rest. As each
one of us has his soul, a subtler essence than that of the body,
so, in nature, everything was said to have been animated, to be
accompanied by a vaguely spiritual entity. Spirits once having
been admitted, humanity passed, so it is said, from belief
to adoration: hence a natural philosophy, animism, from
which religion sprang. To this hypothesis another theory
is apparently preferred to-day. In a "pre-animist" or "ani-
matist" phase, humanity is supposed to have imagined an
impersonal force, such as the Polynesian mana, present in the

ii BELIEF IN SPIRITS 149

whole, unequally distributed between the parts; the spirits
come in later. If our analyses are correct, what was first con-
ceived was neither an impersonal force nor spirits already
individualized: man simply attributed purpose to things and
events, as if nature had eyes everywhere which she focused
on man. That this is an original tendency, we can all verify
when a sudden shock arouses the primitive man dormant
within us all. What we feel in these cases is the sensation of
an efficient presence; the nature of this presence is of little
consequence, the essential point is its efficiency: the moment
there is any regard for us, even if the intention is not good,
we begin to count for something in the universe. That is
what experience tells us. But, even before we consult ex-
perience, it would seem highly unlikely that humanity should
have begun by theoretical views of any sort or kind. We shall
say it over and over again: before man can philosophize man
must live; it is from a vital necessity that the primeval ten-
dencies and convictions must have originated. To connect
religion with a system of ideas, with a logic or a "pre-logic",
is to turn our remote ancestors into intellectuals, and
intellectuals such as we ought to be in greater numbers
ourselves, for we often see the finest theories succumbing to
passion and interest and only holding good in our hours of
speculative thought, whereas ancient religions pervaded the
whole of life. The truth is that religion, being co-extensive
with our specie,'must"be an effect of our structure. We have
just now connected it with a fundamental experience; but
that experience was such that we had an inkling of it before
encountering it; in any case it is quite easily explained when it
has been encountered; all we have to do is to put man back
among living things as a whole, and psychology into biology.
For, look at any other animal. It avails itself of everything it
finds useful. Does it actually believe itself to be the centre of
the world? Probably not, for it has no conception of the world
as such, and, besides, it has not the slightest inclination to
speculate. But since it only sees, or at least only takes note of
what can satisfy its needs, since things exist for it only in so
far as it makes use of them, it obviously behaves as though

i S o STATIC RELIGION CH.

everything in nature were combined solely with a view to its
well-being and in the interest of its species. Such is its convic-
tion, not intellectualized, but lived, a conviction which sus-
tains the animal and is indistinguishable from its effort to live.
You bring reflexion into play, however, and this conviction
will vanish; man will perceive himself, will think of him-
self as a speck in the immensity of the universe. He would
feel lost, if the effort to live did not at once project into
his intelligence, into the very place that this perception and
this reflexion were about to occupy, the opposing image of
things and events turning towards man; whether well or ill
disposed, a certain intention of his environment follows him
then everywhere, just as the moon seems to run with him when
he runs. If it be good, he will rely on it. If it bodes harm, he
will try to avert its effects. In any case, it means that he has
been taken into account. Here is ho theory, no room for the
arbitrary. This conviction is forced upon him, there being no
philosophy about it, but a vital impulsion.

In like manner, if indeed it splits and evolves into two
divergent directions, on the one hand towards belief in
spirits already individualized, and on the other towards the
idea of an impersonal essence, that is not on account of any
theory: such reasoning leads to controversy, permits of doubt,
gives rise to doctrines, which may exert an influence on con-
duct, but which do not impinge upon all the incidents of
existence, and could not possibly become the guiding forces of
life as a whole. The truth is that once the conviction is firmly
implanted in the will, the latter impels it in these directions
which are open already, or which open out before it at the
points of least resistance all along the path of its effort. It will
utilize in every possible way the intention which it feels to
be present, either by taking the physical effectiveness which
the intention possesses, exaggerating its materiality and then
trying to master it by force, or by approaching it from the
moral side, by impelling it, on the contrary, ih the direction
of a personality to be won over by prayer. It is, then, from the
demands of an efficient magic that there arose a conception
such as mana, an impoverishment or a materialization of the

ii BELIEF IN SPIRITS 151

original belief: and it is the desire to obtain favours that drew
from the same belief, in the opposite direction, spirits and
gods. Neither has the impersonal evolved towards the per-
sonal, nor have pure personalities been posited at the out-
set: but, out of some intermediate thing, intended rather to
sustain the will than to inform the intelligence, there have
emerged through dissociation, downwards and upwards, the
forces that lie beneath the weight of magic, and the gods
towards whom the voice of human prayer is raised.

On the first point we have made our opinion clear. We
should have a heavy task if we had to deal at length with the
second. The gradual evolution of religion towards gods of
increasingly marked personality, who are more and more
definitely interrelated or who tend to become merged into a
single deity, corresponds to the first of the two great advances
of humanity towards civilization. It went on until the day
when the religious spirit turned from the outward to the in-
ward, from the static to the dynamic, by a change of front
similar to that performed by pure intelligence when it passed
over from the study of finite magnitudes to the differential
calculus. This last change was doubtless the decisive one:
transformations of the individual became possible, like those
that have produced the successive species in the organized
world; progress could thenceforth consist in the creation of
new qualities, and not as previously in a mere increase in
size; instead of merely taking what life had to give, just where
it was, at the point reached, the vital movement was now going
to be carried forward. We shall deal with this religion, an
entirely inward one, in the next chapter. We shall see that
it sustains man by the very movement it imparts to him,
placing him, as it does, back in the creative impetus, and not
as hitherto through imaginative representations intended to
reconcile in him the activity of the parts with the immobility
of the whole. But we shall also see that religious dynamism
needs static religion for its expression and diffusion. It is
therefore comprehensible that the latter should hold first
place in the history of religions. It is not our business, we
repeat, to follow static religion through the immense variety

iS2 STATIC RELIGION CH.

of its manifestations. It will suffice to indicate the principal
ones and bring out the connexion between them.

Let us start then from the idea that there are intentions
inherent in things: this brings us at once to the representation
of spirits. They are the vague entities dwelling, for instance,
in springs, rivers and fountains. Each spirit is bound to the
spot where it manifests itself. This feature already dis-
tinguishes it from a divinity proper, which will be able, while
remaining indivisible, to apportion itself between various
places, and to hold sway over everything belonging to one
and the same genus. This divinity will bear a name; it will
have its own particular shape, its clearly defined personality,
whereas the countless spirits of the woods and fountains are
copies of one model and could, at most, say with Horace:
nos nurnerus sumus. Later on, when religion has attained
to the height of those exalted personages, the gods, it may
[well conjure up spirits in their image, such spirits will be
'minor deities; and they will then appear to have always been
feo. But this is merely a retroactive effect. It probably took a
long time, in Greece, for the spirit of a spring to become a
graceful nymph, and the spirit of the wood a hamadryad. In
the beginning, the spirit of the spring must have been the
spring itself, as possessing a beneficent virtue for man. To
put it more clearly, that beneficent action, in its ever-present
aspect, was the spirit. It would be an error in such a case to
regard as an abstract idea I mean an idea extracted from
things by an intellectual effort the representation of the act
and of its continuation. It is a datum provided directly by the
senses. Our philosophy and our language first posit the sub-
stance and surround it with attributes, and then make such
and such acts arise therefrom like emanations. But we cannot
too often repeat that the action may be forthcoming first and
be self-sufficient, especially in cases where man is particularly
concerned. Such is the act of supplying us with drink: it can
be localized in a thing, and then in a person; but it has its own
independent existence; and if the process goes on indefinitely,
its very persistence will set it up as the animating spirit of the
spring at which we drink, whilst the spring, detached from

ii DEFERENCE PAID TO ANIMALS 153

the function which it performs, will relapse the more com-
pletely into the state of a thing pure and simple. It is true
that the souls of the dead naturally enough join with the
spirits; though detached from their bodies, they have not yet
renounced their personality. In mingling with the spirits they
inevitably colour them and, by the hues with which they
tinge them, pave the way for them to become persons. Thus,
by different but converging paths, the spirits will be advanc-
ing towards a complete personality. But in the elemental
form which they first possess, they fulfil so natural a need
that we must not be surprised to find the belief in spirits
underlying all ancient religions. We spoke of the part it
played among the Greeks: after being their primitive religion,
so far as we can judge by the Mycenean civilization, it
remained the popular religion. It was the basis of the Roman
religion even after the most generous provision had been
made for the greater divinities imported from Greece or else-
where: the larfamiliaris, who was the spirit of the house, was
always to retain its importance. With the Romans as with the
Greeks, the goddess called Hestia or Vesta must have begun
as nothing more than the flame on the hearth, considered in
its function, I mean in its beneficent intention. Suppose we
leave classical antiquity and turn to India, and China and
Japan: everywhere we shall find this belief in spirits; we are
told that even to-day it constitutes (with ancestor-worship,
which is very closely akin to it) the essential element of
Chinese religion. Because it is universal, it was easy to
belifcve that it was original. Let us at least note that it is not
very far removed from the original state, and that the human
mind naturally passes through this belief before attaining to
the adoration of the gods.

It might well stop at an intermediate stage. We are
alluding to the cult of animals, so widespread among past
humanity that some people have considered it as still more
natural than the adoration of the gods in human shape. We
find it, full of life and tenacity, holding its own even in
countries where man already represents the gods in his own
image. It survived thus right up to the end in ancient Egypt.

L

i S 4 STATIC RELIGION CH.

Sometimes the god that has emerged from the animal form
refuses to cast it off entirely; his human body is crowned by
an animal's head. Such things appear to-day very surprising.
This is mainly because man has become endowed in our eyes
with an outstanding dignity. We regard intelligence as his
main characteristic, and we know that there is no superiority
which intelligence cannot confer on us, no inferiority for
which it cannot compensate. It was not so in the days before
intelligence had proved its worth. Its actual inventions were
too few for its boundless potentialities of invention to be
apparent; the weapons and tools with which it supplied man
could hardly stand comparison with those the animal in-
herited from nature. Even reflexion itself, the secret of man's
strength, might look like weakness, for it is the source of
indecision, whereas the reaction of an animal, when it is truly
instinctive, is instantaneous and unfailing. Even the fact that
it lacks the power of speech has served the animal by sur-
rounding it with a halo of mystery. Its silence, moreover, can
pass for contempt, as though it had something better to do
than to converse with us. All this explains why humanity
should have felt no aversion to animal worship. But how has
it come about? We must note that it is for some specific
quality that the animal is adored. In ancient Egypt the bull
represented strength in battle; the lioness, destruction; the
vulture, so careful of her young, motherhood. Now it would
be incomprehensible that animals should become the object
of a cult if man had begun by believing in spirits. But if man
did not first have recourse to beings, but to beneficent or
malevolent actions regarded as permanent, it is natural that
after having gained control of actions, he should have wanted
to get hold of qualities; these qualities seemed to be present,
unalloyed, in animals, whose activity is simple, invariably
consistent and apparently set in one direction. The adoration
of animals was not, then, the primitive phase of religion; but
on emerging from that phase, man had the choice between
the cult of spirits and that of animals.

Just as the nature of an animal seems to be concentrated
in one single quality, so it would seem that its individuality

ii TOTEMISM 155

merges into a type. To recognize a man is to distinguish him
from other men; but to recognize an animal is usually to
identify the species to which it belongs: that is the particular
character of our interest in each case; consequently in the
first case our perception seizes on the individual character-
istics, whereas in the latter it nearly always ignores them. An
animal, for all it is something concrete and individual, never-
theless stands forth as essentially a quality, essentially also a
species. Of these two striking features the first, as we have
just seen, largely explains the cult of animals. The second
would account to a certain extent, we believe, for that strange
thing, totemism. This is not the place to study the question:
we cannot, however, refrain from saying a word about the
subject, for if totemism is not animal worship, it nevertheless
implies that man treats an animal, or even a vegetable species,
sometimes a mere inanimate object, with a deference which
is not without some resemblance to religion. Let us take the
commonest case, that of an animal, a rat or a kangaroo, for
example, which serves as a " totem", that is to say a patron,
for a whole clan. The most striking thing is that the members
of the clan assert they are one with it; they are rats, they are
kangaroos. True, it remains to be seen in what sense they use
the word. To conclude straightaway that there is a specific
logic, peculiar to "primitive man" and exempt from the prin-
ciple of contradiction, would be somewhat over-hasty. Our
verb "to be" carries meanings that we have difficulty in
defining for all our civilization: how can we reconstitute the
meaning given by a primitive man in such and such a case to
a similar word, even when he supplies us with explanations?
These explanations would only possess an element of pre-
cision if he were a philosopher, and even then we should have
to know all the fine shades of his language to understand them.
Think of the opinion he, on his side, would have of us and
our powers of observation and reasoning, of our common
sense, if he knew that the greatest of our moralists has said
"man is a reed that thinks". 1 And besides, does he converse

1 "L'homme n'est qu'un roseau, le plus faible de la nature, mais c'est
un roseau pensant" (PASCAL).

i S 6 STATIC RELIGION CH.

with his totem? Does he treat it as a man? Note that we are
always being brought back to the same point: to know what
is going on in the mind of a primitive man, or even of a civilized
man, we must study -what he does at least as closely as what he
says. Now, if the primitive man does not identify himself
with his totem, does he simply take it as an emblem? This
would be going too far the other way: even if totemism is not
at the basis of the political organization of non-civilized
people, as Durkheim would have it, it occupies too large a
place in their existence for us to see in it merely a means of
designating the clan. The truth must lie somewhere half-way
between these two extreme explanations. Let us offer, simply
as a hypothesis, the interpretation to which we might be led
by our principles. That a clan is said to be such or such an
animal, offers no ground for deduction; but that two clans
within the same tribe must necessarily be two different
animals is far more enlightening. Let us suppose, indeed,
that it is desired to indicate these two clans as constituting
two species, in the biological sense of the word: how is this to
be managed in cases where the language is not yet instinct
with science and philosophy? The individual characteristics
of an animal do not catch our attention; the animal is per-
ceived, we said, as a species. To express the fact that two
clans constitute two different species, the name of one animal
will be given to one, that of another to the other. Each of these
designations, taken singly, is no more than a label: taken
together they are equivalent to an affirmation. They indicate
in fact that the two clans are of different blood. Why is this?
If totemism is to be found, as we are assured it is, in various
parts of the globe among communities which can have held
no possible communication with one another, it must corre-
spond to a common need of these communities, a vital
necessity. In fact we know that the clans into which the tribe
is divided are often exogamous: in other words, marriages
are contracted between members of different clans, but not
within one clan. It was even believed for a long time that this
was a general law, and that totemism always implied exo-
gamy. Let us suppose that this was so at the beginning, and

ii TOTEMISM 157

that in many cases exogamy fell out of use later on. It is easy
to understand that it is in the interests of nature to prevent
the members of a tribe from habitually inter-marrying, the
final result in a closed society such as this being unions
between near relations: the race would very soon degenerate.
An instinct, overlaid by quite different habits as soon as it
ceases to be useful, will predispose the tribe to split up into
clans, within which marriage will be forbidden. This instinct,
as a matter of fact, will attain its object by at once causing a
feeling of relationship between members of the same clan,
and between clan and clan a feeling of being as foreign as
possible to each other, for its modus operandi, which we can
see working in our societies as well, is to diminish the sexual
attraction between men and women who live together or who
know they are related. 1 How then will the members of two
different clans convince themselves, and express the fact, that
they are not of the same blood? They will get into the habit
of saying that they are not of the same species. So then, when
they declare that they constitute two animal species, it is not
on the animality, but on the duality that they lay the stress.
At least it must have been so in the beginning. We must in-
deed admit that we are dealing here merely with the probable,
not to say with the purely possible. We only want to apply, to
a very controversial problem, the method which appears to
us as the surest generally. Starting from a biological necessity,
we search for the corresponding need in the living creature.
If this need does not actually create a real and active instinct,
it conjures up, by means of what we call a virtual or latent
instinct, an imaginative representation which determines
conduct in the same way as instinct would have done. At the
basis of totemism there may well be a representation of this
sort. 2

But let us close this parenthesis, opened for an object, of

1 See, on this subject, Westermarck, History of Human Marriage
(London, 1901), pp. 290 sqq.

2 The idea that the class takes its descent from the totem animal an
idea which M. Van Gennep emphasizes in his interesting work on L'Etat
actuel du prdblkme totemique (Paris, 1920) may quite well be grafted on
to the representation we have indicated.

i 5 8 STATIC RELIGION CH.

which it may be said that it deserved better treatment. We
were dealing with spirits. We believe that, to get at the very
essence of religion and understand the history of mankind,
one must needs pass at once from the static and outer religion,
with which we have been dealing up to now, to that dynamic,
inner religion which we shall discuss in the next chapter.
The first was designed to ward off the dangers to which
intelligence might expose man; it was infra-intellectual. Let
us add that it was natural, for the human species marks a
certain stage in the vital evolution: it was here that at a given
moment the forward movement stopped; man was then
posited as a whole, with, therefore, his intelligence, with the
dangers this intelligence might involve, with the myth-making
function designed to cope with them; magic and elementary
animism, it all appeared as an unbroken whole, it all corre-
sponded exactly to the needs of the individual and of society,
the one and the other limited in their ambitions, such as
nature intended them. Later, and by an effort which might
easily never have been made, man wrenched himself free
from this motion of his on his own axis. He plunged anew
into the current of evolution, at the same time carrying it
forward. Here was dynamic religion, coupled doubtless with
higher intellectuality, but distinct from it. The first form
of religion had been infra-intellectual; we know why. The
second, for reasons which we shall indicate, was supra-intel-
lectual. By contrasting them from the outset, we shall best
understand them. For these two extreme religions are alone
essential and pure. The intermediate forms, which developed
in antique civilizations, could only lead the philosophy of
religion astray, if they induced the belief that man passed
from one extremity to the other by the road of gradual perfec-
tion: doubtless a natural error, explained by the fact that static
religion has to some extent lingered on into dynamic religion,
But these intermediate forms have occupied so large a place
in the known history of humanity that we cannot but dwell
on them. For our part we see in them nothing absolutely new,
nothing comparable to dynamic religion, nothing but varia-
tions on the twofold theme of elementary animism and magic:

ii BELIEF IN GODS 159

a belief in spirits, after all, has always remained the basis of
popular religion. But from the myth-making faculty, which
had elaborated it, there issued, through a later development,
a mythology round which there grew up a literature, an
art, institutions, in a word, the essential elements of antique
civilization. Let us discuss, then, that mythology without ever
losing sight of that which was its starting-point, and which is
still visible through it.

The transition from spirits to gods may be gradual, the
difference is none the less striking. The god is a person.
He has his qualities, his defects, his character. He bears a
name. He stands in definite relationship to other gods. He
fulfils important functions, and, above all, he is alone in ful-
filling them. On the contrary, there are thousands of different
spirits, scattered far and wide over the country, all doing the
same work; they are described by a common name, and this
name may, in certain cases, not even possess a singular form:
manes and penates, to take only these examples, are Latin
words only found in the plural. If the true original religious
representation is that of an "effective presence", of an act
rather than of a person or a thing, belief in spirits lies very
close indeed to those origins; the gods only appear later, when
the substantiality, pure and simple, of the spirits rises, in one
or the other of them, to the level of a personality. These gods
are superadded to the spirits, but do not replace them. The
cult of spirits remains, as we Kave said, the basis of popular
religion. The more enlightened part of the nation will none
the less prefer the gods, and it may be said that progress
towards polytheism is an advance towards civilization.

It is useless to seek for a rhythm or a law in this advance.
It is essentially capricious. From among the countless spirits
we see some local deity spring up, modest at first, growing
with the city, and finally adopted by the whole nation. But
other evolutions are also possible. It is indeed rare for the
evolution to end in anything like finality. However exalted
the god may be, his divinity by no means implies immutability.
On the contrary, they are the principal gods of antique
religions that have undergone the greatest changes, enriching

i6o STATIC RELIGION CH.

themselves with new attributes by the absorption of other
gods, and thus increasing their own substance. In Egypt, for
example, the sun god Re, at first an object of supreme ador-
ation, absorbs other. divinities, assimilates them or couples
himself to them, amalgamates with the great Theban god,
Ammon, forming in this case Ammon Re. Thus Marduk,
the god of Babylon, appropriates the attributes of Bel, the
high god of Nippur. Thus several Assyrian gods are merged
into the mighty goddess Ishtar. But no evolution is richer
than that of Zeus, the sovereign god of Greece. After having
begun probably as the god worshipped on the mountain-
tops, holding sway over the clouds, and the rain, and the
thunder, he has added to what we might call his meteorological
functions certain social attributes which become more and
more complex; and he ends by being the tutelary god of all
social groups, from the family to the state. It became neces-
sary to place after his name the most varied epithets to dis-
tinguish all the lines of his activity: Xenios, when he watched
over the observances of hospitality; Horkios, when he pre-
sided over the swearing of oaths; Hikesios, when he protected
the supplicants; Genethlios, when he was invoked for a
marriage, etc. The evolution is generally slow and natural;
but it can be rapid also, and be effected artificially under the
very eyes of the worshippers. The divinities of Olympus date
from the Homeric poems, which did not perhaps create them,
but in which they were given the forms and the attributes
under which we know them, and which co-ordinated and
Srouped them under Zeus, the process this time being rather
one of simplification than of complication. They were none
the less accepted by the Greeks, though the latter knew the
circumstances and almost the date of their birth. But there
was no need to call in the genius of the poets; a prince's
decree sufficed to make and unmake gods. Without going
into the details of such interventions, let us merely recall the
most radical of them all, that of the Pharaoh who took the
name of Iknaton: he abolished the gods of Egypt in favour
of one among them, and succeeded in getting this sort of
monotheism accepted until the time of his death. We know,

ii BELIEF IN GODS 161

moreover, that the Pharaohs themselves shared in the divin-
ity. From the most remote antiquity they styled themselves
"sons of Re". And the Egyptian tradition of treating the
sovereign as a god was continued under the Ptolemies. It was
not confined to Egypt. We meet with it in Syria under the
Seleucides, in China, in Japan, where the Emperor receives
divine honours during his lifetime and becomes a god after
his death, and lastly in Rome, where the Senate deified
Julius Caesar, before Augustus, Claudius, Vespasian, Titus,
Nerva, and finally all the Emperors rose to the rank of gods.
Doubtless the adoration of the sovereign is not taken equally
seriously everywhere. There is a great distance, for example,
between the divinity of a Roman Emperor and that of a
Pharaoh. The latter is closely related to the divinity of the
chief in primitive societies; it is perhaps connected with the
idea of a special fluid, or a magic power, supposed to reside
in the sovereign, whereas the divinity conferred on Caesar
was a case of mere toadyism, being utilized later by Augustus
as an instrumentum regni. And yet the half-sceptical attitude
mingled with the adoration of the Emperors remained, in
Rome, a prerogative of cultivated minds; it did not extend to
the people; it certainly did not spread to the provinces. This
means that the gods of antiquity could be born, die, be trans-
formed at the whim of man or by circumstances, and that
pagan faith was limitless in its compliance.

Precisely because men's fancy and fortuitous circumstances
have played so large a part in their genesis, the gods cannot be
fitted into a hard and fast classification. The most we can do
is to bring out a few main trends of mythological fantasy; and
even so, no single one has been by any means regularly
followed. As gods were for the most part set up to serve a
useful purpose, it is natural that functions should be generally
attributed to them, and that in many cases the idea of a
particular function should have predominated. This is what
occurred in Rome, and it has made it possible to say that the
specialization of gods was characteristic of Roman religion.
For the sowing there was Saturn; for the flowering of fruit
trees, Flora; for the ripening of fruit, Pomona. The guardian-

162 STATIC RELIGION CH.

ship of the door was attributed to Janus, that of the hearth to
Vesta. Rather than attribute to the same god a multiplicity
of interrelated functions, it preferred to set up distinct gods,
content to give them the same name with varying epithets.
There was Venus Victrix, Venus Felix, Venus Genetrix.
Jupiter himself was Fulgur, Feretrius, Stator, Victor, Opti-
mus Maximus; and these were, up to a certain point, distinct;
they were milestones along the road, from Jupiter, dispenser
of rain or sunshine, to Jupiter, protector of the state in peace
and war. But the same tendency is exhibited everywhere in
varying degrees. Ever since man began to cultivate the soil,
there have been gods to watch over the harvest, to dispense
heat, to ensure the regularity of the seasons. These agricultural
functions must have been characteristic of some of the most
ancient deities, even though they have been lost sight of, as
the evolution of the god made him a complex personality,
overlaid with a long history. Thus Osiris, the richest figure
in the Egyptian Pantheon, seems to have been at first the god
of vegetation. This was the primitive function vested in the
Adonis of the Greeks. It was also that of Nisaba, in Baby-
lonia, who held sway over the corn crops before she became
the goddess of Science. In the first rank of the divinities of
India figure Indra and Agni. To Indra man owed the rain
and the storms beneficent for the soil; to Agni, fire, and the
protection of the domestic hearth; and here again the diversity
of functions goes with a difference of character, Indra being
distinguished by his strength, Agni by his wisdom. The most
exalted function is indeed that of Varuna, who presides over
the universal order of things. We find in the Shinto religion,
in Japan, the earth-goddess, the goddess of harvests, the gods
that watch over the mountains, the trees, etc. But no divinity
of this type has so marked and complete a personality as the
Demeter of the Greeks; she too is a goddess of the soil and
harvests, but she also cares for the dead, to whom she gives a
place of abode, besides presiding, under the name of Thesmo-
phoros, over family and social life. There you have the most
conspicuous development of the god-making fantasy.

By endowing them with functions, however, it attributes

ii MYTHOLOGICAL FANTASY 163

to them a sovereignty which quite naturally assumes a terri-
torial form. The gods are supposed to share the universe
between them. According to the Vedic poems their various
spheres of influence are heaven, earth and the middle air.
In the Babylonian cosmology the sky is the realm of Anu, the
earth that of Bel; in the depths of the sea dwells Ea. The
Greeks divided the world between Zeus, god of heaven and
earth, Poseidon, god of the seas, and Hades, to whom belonged
the infernal regions. These realms are marked out by nature
herself. Now the sun, moon and stars are no less distinct in
outline; they are individualized by their shape as well as by
their movements, which appear to depend on themselves; one
of them is the dispenser of life here below, and the others,
even though they be not equally powerful, must none the less
be of the same nature; so in them also we find the stuff of
gods. It is in Assyria that the belief in the divinity of the
heavenly bodies assumed the most systematic form. But the
worship of the sun and also of the sky is to be found more or
less everywhere: in the Shinto religion of Japan, where the
goddess of the sun is set up as sovereign, with, under her, a
moon-god and a star-god; in the primitive Egyptian religion,
where the moon and the sky are considered as gods alongside
the sun, who is their lord; in the Vedic religion, where Mitra
(identical with the Iranian Mithra, who is a sun-deity) has
attributes which would be appropriate to a god of sun or light;
in the ancient Chinese religion, where the sun is a personal
god; lastly, among the Greeks themselves, where Helios is
one of the most ancient gods. Among the Indo-Germanic
peoples, in general, the sky has been the object of a special
cult. Under the name of Dyaus, Zeus, Jupiter, Ziu, such a
god is common to Vedic India, the Greeks and Romans and
the Teutons, though only in Greece and Rome is he king of
the gods, like the celestial deity of the Mongols in China.
Here especially we note the tendencies of the very ancient
gods, entrusted in the beginning with entirely material tasks,
to enrich themselves, as they grow older, with moral attributes.
In Southern Babylonia the sun, who is all-seeing, has become
the guardian of right and justice; he receives the title of

164 STATIC RELIGION CH.

"judge". The Vedic Mitra is the champion of truth and right;
he gives victory to the righteous cause. And the Egyptian
Osiris, who has become one with the sun-god after having
been the god of vegetation, has ended by being the great
judge, merciful and just, who reigns over the land of the
dead.

All these gods are closely connected with things. But there
are others often the same ones seen from a different angle
that are defined by their connexion with persons or groups.
Are we to consider as a god the personal genius or daemon of
a particular individual? The Roman genius was numen> not
deus\ it had neither shape nor name; it was very near to that
mere "effective presence" which we have seen to be the
primitive and essential element of divinity. The personality
of the lar familiaris y who watched over the family, was scarcely
more marked. But the bigger the group, the stronger its right
to a real god. In Egypt, for example, each of the primitive
cities had its divine guardian. And these gods were distin-
guished one from the other precisely by their connexion with
this or that community; to call them "He of Edfu", "He of
Nekkeb", was clear enough. But in most cases they were
deities who existed before the group, and whom the latter had
adopted. This was the case, in Egypt itself, for Amon-Re,
god of Thebes. It was the same in Babylonia, where the city
of Ur has as its goddess the moon, the city of Uruk the
planet Venus. It was the same in Greece, where Demeter
was particularly at home in Eleusis, Athene on the Acropolis,
Artemis in Arcadia. Often protectors and protected stood or
fell together; the gods of a city gained by the aggrandisement
of that city. War thus became a struggle between rival deities.
The latter might indeed come to terms, and the gods of the
conquered people then entered the pantheon of the victor.
But the truth is that the city or the empire on the one hand,
and its tutelary gods on the other, formed an undefined
partnership, which must have varied indefinitely in character.

Nevertheless, it is for our own convenience that we thus
define and classify the gods of fable. No law governed their
birth, any more than their development; in this case humanity

ii MYTH-MAKING AND LITERATURE 165

has given free play to its instinct for myth-making. Doubtless
this instinct does not go very far when left to itself, but it
progresses unceasingly if one is pleased to exercise it. The
differences are very great, on this point, between the myth-
ologies of different peoples. Classical antiquity shows us an
example of this opposition: Roman mythology is poor, that
of the Greeks superabundant. The gods of ancient Rome
coincide with the functions with which they are clothed and
are thus, so to speak, immobilized in them. They barely
possess a body, I mean an imaginable shape. They are barely
gods. On the contrary each god of ancient Greece has his
physiognomy, his character, his history. He moves about, does
things quite outside the mere performance of his functions.
His adventures are told, his intervention in our affairs de-
scribed. He lends himself to every fancy of the artist and the
poet. He would be, more accurately, a character in a novel, if
it were not that he had a power greater than that of mortal
man and the privilege, at least in certain cases, of interfering
with the regular working of the laws of nature. In a word,
the myth-making function of the mind has in the first case
stopped short, in the second it has continued its work. But it
remains the same function. It will resume, if need be, the
interrupted work. This is what happened with the introduction
of Greek literature, and more generally of Greek ideas, into
Rome. We know how the Romans identified some of their
gods with those of Hellas, thus endowing them with a more
marked personality, and changing them from immobility to
movement.

We have said of this myth-making function that it would
be wrong to define it as a variant of imagination. This last
word has a somewhat negative meaning. We call imaginative
any concrete representation which is neither perception nor
memory. Since such representations depict neither a present
object nor a past thing, they are all considered in the same
light by common sense and given the same name in ordinary
speech. But the psychologist must not for that reason group
them in the same category, or connect them with the same
function. Let us then leave aside imagination, which is but

166 STATIC RELIGION CH.

a word, and consider a very clearly defined faculty of the
mind, that of creating personalities whose stories we relate
to ourselves. It is singularly vivid in novelists and dramatists.
There are some among them who become really obsessed by
their hero; it is he who controls them, not they who control
him; they even have difficulty in getting rid of him when they
have finished their play or their novel. These writers are not
necessarily those whose work is of the highest quality; but,
better than others, they enable us to put our finger on the
existence, at least in some of us, of a special faculty of volun-
tary hallucination. In truth, it is found, to some degree, in
everyone. It is very vivid in children. We find a child keeping
up a daily intercourse with some imaginary person, whose
name he can give, whose impressions about every incident of
the day he can repeat to you. But the same faculty comes
into play in those who, without creating fictitious beings for
themselves, are as interested in fictions as in real things.
What sight is there more amazing than that of a theatre
audience in tears? We shall be told that the play is being
performed by actors and that human beings of flesh and
blood are on the stage. Agreed, but we can be almost as
completely "gripped" by the novel we are reading, and
sympathize just as keenly with the people whose story is
being told us. How is it that psychologists have not been
struck by the mysterious element in such a faculty as this?
The answer will be that all our faculties are mysterious,
inasmuch as we are ignorant of the inner mechanism of
them. True, but this is no question of mechanical recon-
struction, we are entitled to ask for a psychological explana-
tion. And the explanation is the same in psychology as in
biology: the existence of a function is accounted for, when we
have shown how and why it is necessary to life. Now novelists
and dramatists are certainly not necessities; the myth-making
faculty in general does not correspond to a vital need. But let
us suppose that on one particular point, when utilized for a
given object, this function be indispensable to the existence
of individuals as well as of societies: we can easily understand
that, while designed for this work, for which it is indispens-

ii MYTH-MAKING AND LITERATURE 167

able, it should be further employed, since it is still there, for
mere amusement. As a matter of fact, we pass quite easily
from the novel of to-day to more or less ancient tales, to
legends, to folklore, and from folklore to mythology, which is
not the same thing, but which was developed in the same way;
mythology, in its turn, merely develops the personalities of
the gods into a story, and this last creation is but the exten-
sion of another and simpler one, that of the "semi-personal
powers " or "efficient presences" which are, we believe, at the
origin of religion. Here we get at what we have shown to be
a fundamental demand of life: this demand has called into
being the myth-making faculty; the myth-making function is
thus to be deduced from the conditions of existence of the
human species. Without going back over what we have already
stated at great length, let us recall that, in the realm of life,
what appears under analysis to be an infinitely complex
presents itself to intuition as an undivided act. The act might
quite well not have been performed; but, if it is performed,
then it has, in one stride, got across all the obstacles. These
obstacles, each one of which raised up another, constitute an
endless multiplicity, and it is precisely with the removal, one
after the other, of all these obstacles that our analysis has to
deal. To try and explain each of these processes of elimina-
tion by the preceding one would be going the wrong way to
work; they are all to be explained by one single operation,
which is the act itself in its simplicity. Thus the undivided
movement of the arrow triumphs at one sweep over the
innumerable obstacles which our perception, assisted by
Zeno's reasoning, thinks it detects in the immobility of
the points making up the line of flight. Thus, too, the un-
divided act of vision, by the mere fact of succeeding, over-
comes at a stroke thousands and thousands of obstacles;
this act of circumvention is what is apparent to our percep-
tion and to our science in the multiplicity of cells constituting
the eye, the intricateness of our visual apparatus, in short,
the endless series of mechanisms which are at work in the
process of seeing. Posit in the same way the human species,
that is to say the sudden leap by which life in its evolution

i68 STATIC RELIGION CH.

came to man, both individual and social, you will then be
positing a tool-contriving intelligence and consequently an
effort which is bound to go on, of its own momentum, beyond
the mere tool-makiug operation for which it was intended;
and this creates a danger. If the human species does exist,
it is because the very act which posited man with his tool-
contriving intelligence, with the necessary continuation of
his intellectual effort, and the danger arising from such a
continuation, begot the myth-making function. The latter
was not, then, purposed by nature; and yet it sprang up
naturally. If, indeed, we add it to all the other psychical
functions, we find that the sum total expresses in a multiple
form the indivisible act by which life leapt onwards to man,
from that rung of the ladder at which it had stopped.

But let us look more closely into the reason why the myth-
making function imposes its inventions with exceptional
force when working in the realm of religion. There, without
any doubt, it is at home; it is made for the creation of spirits
and gods; but since it continues its myth-making work else-
where, we must ask why, though operating in the same way,
it no longer commands the same credence. We may find two
reasons for this.

The first is that, where religion is concerned, the adherence
of each individual is reinforced by the adherence of all. Even
in the theatre, the spectator's ready acceptance of the drama-
tist's suggestions is singularly increased by the attention and
the interest of the society in which he finds himself. But in
this case we have a society just the size of the hall, and
enduring only just as long as the play lasts: what if the
individual belief is supported, confirmed by a whole people,
and if it rests both on the past and on the present? What if
the god is sung by poets, if he dwells in temples, if he is
portrayed by art? So long as experimental science is not
firmly established, there will be no surer guarantee of the
truth than universal assent. Nay, truth will as a rule be this
very assent. We may note, by the way, that this is one of the
causes of intolerance. The man who does not accept the
common belief prevents it, while he dissents, from being

ii ON THE EXISTENCE OF GODS 169

utterly true. Truth will only regain its entirety if he retracts
or disappears.

We do not mean to say that religious belief can never have
been, even in polytheism, an individual belief. Each Roman
had a genius attached to his person; but he only believed so
firmly in his genius because every other Roman had his own
genius, and because his faith, personal on this point, was
guaranteed to him by a universal faith. We do not mean to
say either that religion has ever been social in essence rather
than individual: we have, indeed, seen that the myth-making
function, innate in the individual, has as its first object the
consolidation of society; but we know that it is also intended
to support the individual himself, and that, moreover, such is
the interest of society. As a matter of fact, the individual and
society are implied in each other: individuals make up society
by their grouping together; society shapes an entire side of
the individual by being prefigured in each one of them. The
individual and society thus condition each other, circle-wise.
The circle, intended by nature, was broken by man the day
he became able to get back into the creative impetus, and
impel human nature forward instead of letting it revolve on
one spot. From that day there dates an essentially individual
religion, one that has become thereby, it is true, more pro-
foundly social. But we shall revert to this point. Let us only
say that the guarantee brought by society to individual belief,
in the matter of religion, would suffice in itself to put these
inventions of the myth-making function in a unique position.

Biit we must bear yet another thing in mind. We have seen
how the ancients witness, unconcerned, the birth of this or
that god. Thenceforth they would believe in him as they did
in all the others. This would be incredible, if we supposed
that the existence of their gods was of the same nature to
thefii as the objects they saw and touched: It was real, but
with a reality that yet hinged in some degree on the human
will.

The gods of pagan civilization are indeed distinguishable
from older entities, elves, gnomes, spirits, which popular
belief never actually abandoned. The latter were the almost

M

i 7 o STATIC RELIGION CH.

direct product of that myth-making faculty which is natural
to us; and they were naturally adopted, just as they had been
naturally produced. They conformed exactly to the need from
which they sprang. But mythology, which is an amplification
of primitive activity, extends beyond this need in all direc-
tions. The interval it leaves between this need and itself is
filled with a matter in the choice of which human fancy has a
large share, and this affects the assent accorded to it. It is
always the same faculty intervening, and it obtains for its
inventions, as a whole, the same credence. But each invention,
taken separately, is accepted with the reservation that another
would have been possible. The pantheon exists, independent
of man, but on man depends the placing of a god in it, and
the bestowal of existence on that deity. Such an attitude of
mind does indeed surprise us to-day. Yet we lapse into it
ourselves in certain dreams, where we can introduce, at a
certain moment, the incident we desire: thus a part comes
into being through us, whilst the whole has its own existence
independent of us. In just the same way it could be said that
each distinct god is contingent, whereas the gods as a whole,
or rather the godhead in general, is necessary. If we were to
delve into this point, by pushing logic further than did the
ancients, we should find that there has never been any
absolute pluralism other than the belief in spirits, and that
polytheism, strictly speaking, along with its mythology,
implies a latent monotheism, in which the multiple deities
exist only secondarily, as representatives of the divine.

But the ancients would have held such considerations to be
unessential, such as would only be important if religion
belonged to the realm of knowledge or contemplation. In that
case a mythological tale could be treated like a historical
narrative, and in the one case as in the other the question
of authenticity might arise. But the truth is that there is no
possible comparison between them, because they are not of
the same order. History is knowledge, religion is mainly
action: it only concerns knowledge, as we have repeated over
and over again, in so far as an intellectual representation is
needed to ward off the dangers of a certain intellectuality.

ii ON THE EXISTENCE OF GODS 171

To consider this representation apart, to criticize it as a
representation, would be to forget that it forms an amalgam
with the accompanying action. We commit just such an error
when we ask ourselves how it is that great minds can have
accepted the tissue of childish imaginings, nay, absurdities,
which made up their religion. The movements of a swimmer
would appear just as silly and ridiculous to anyone forgetting
that the water is there, that this water sustains the swimmer,
and that the man's movements, the resistance of the liquid,
the current of the river, must be taken all together as an
undivided whole.

Religion supplies strength and discipline.' For that reason'
regularly repeated exercises are necessary, like those whose
automatism ends by instilling into the body of the soldier
the confidence he will need in the hour of danger. This means
that there is no religion without rites and ceremonies. The
religious representation is above all an occasion for these
religious acts. They doubtless emanate from belief, but they
at once react on it and strengthen it: if gods exist, they must
have their worship; but since there is \vorship, then there must
be gods. This solidarity of the god with the homage paid
him makes of religious truth a thing apart, having no common
measure with speculative truth, and depending, up to a cer-
tain point, on man.

It is precisely towards the tightening up of this solidarity
that rites and ceremonies tend. One might dilate on them at
length. We shall merely touch on the two principal ones,
sacrifice and prayer.

^"Tn'tlie religion which we shall call dynamic, verbal expres
sion is immaterial to prayer, an elevation of the soul that car
dispense with speech. In its lowest form, on the other hanc ,
it was not unlike the incantations of magic; it then aimed, '
not at compelling the will of the gods and above all of th e
spirits, at least at capturing their goodwill. Prayer, as undei
stood in polytheism, generally finds its place half- way betwee: i
these two extremities. No doubt antiquity hit upon admirabl \
forms of prayer, in which there was manifested an aspiratioi
of the soul to improvement. But these were exceptions and,

172 STATIC RELIGION CH.

as it were, anticipations of a purer religious belief. Poly-
theism more generally imposes on prayer a stereotyped form,
with the latent idea that it is not only the significance of the
phrasing, but also the sequence of the words, together with
all the accompanying gestures, which impart to it its efficacy.
We may even say that the more polytheism evolves, the more
particular it becomes on this point; the agency of a priest
becomes more and more indispensable to ensure the school-
ing of the believer. How can we fail to see that this habit of
prolonging the idea of the god, once evoked, through pre-
scribed words and set attitudes, endows his image with a
higher objectivity? We have shown elsewhere that what con-
stitutes the reality of a perception, what distinguishes it from
a figment of the imagination, is, above all, the whole group
of incipient movements which it communicates to the body,
and which complete this perception by the automatic begin-
nings of an action. Movements of this kind may develop
owing to some other cause: but their actuality will flow back
just the same towards the representation that produced them,
and will practically convert it into a thing.

As to sacrifice, it was, doubtless, to begin with, an offering
made with a view to buying the favour of the god, or turning
aside his wrath. If so, the greater the cost and the more
valuable the thing sacrificed, the more acceptable it was likely
to be. This is probably the explanation, at least in part, of the
custom of human sacrifice, a custom to be found in most
ancient religions, perhaps in all, could we trace them back
far enough. There is no limit to the extent of error, or of
horror, to which logic may lead, when it is applied to matters
not pertaining to pure intelligence. But there is something
else in sacrifice: otherwise there would be no explaining why
the offering had to be animal or vegetable, nearly always
animal. To begin with, it is generally agreed that sacrifice
originated in a repast of which the god and his worshippers
were supposed to partake in common. Next, above all, there
was a special virtue in blood. As the principle of life, it gave
the god strength, and enabled him the better to help man, and
perhaps also (but this was a barely conscious idea) it ensured

ii GENERAL FUNCTION OF STATIC RELIGION 173

to him a more substantial existence. It was, like prayer, a link
between man and the deity.

Thus polytheism with its mythology had the twofold effect
of exalting more and more the invisible powers with which
man is surrounded, and of putting man in ever closer contact
with them. Being co-extensive with the ancient civilizations,
it battened on everything they produced, having inspired
literature and art, whence it received still more than it gave.
This means that religious feeling, in antiquity, was made up
of many elements, varying from people to people, but which
have all grouped themselves round an original nucleus. We
have concentrated on this nucleus, because we wished to bring
out the specifically religious element in antique religions. To
some of them, those of India and Persia, a philosophy has
been superadded. But philosophy and religion always remain
distinct. More often than not, indeed, philosophy only comes
into existence to satisfy more cultivated minds; religion lives
on, among the people, in the way we have described. Even
in those cases where the two are mingled, the elements keep
their individuality: religion will have moments when it is
inclined to speculate, philosophy will not shun all idea of
action; but the first will none the less remain essentially
action, the second, above all, thought. In those cases where
religion really became philosophy among the ancients, it
rather discouraged action, and renounced what it had come
into the world to accomplish. Was it still religion? We may
attribute what meaning we like to words, so long as we define
their meaning first; but it would be a mistake to do so when
we happen to be dealing with a word which corresponds to
a natural cutting-up of continuous reality: the most we can
do then is to exclude from the extension of the term such or
such a thing which had become accidentally included in it.
Such is the case with religion. We have shown how this name
is ordinarily applied to representations directed towards
action, and called forth by nature for a clearly defined pur-
pose; it may be that exceptionally, and for obvious reasons,
the meaning of the word has been extended so as to include
some other object; religion must none the less be defined

i 74 STATIC RELIGION CH.

in conformity with what we have called the intention of
nature.

We have explained more than once what is meant in this
case by intention. We have also dwelt at length in this chapter
on the function that nature has assigned to religion. Magic,
animal or spirit worship, worship of gods, mythology, super-
stitions of all kinds, seem very complex, if we take them
one at a time. But, taken all together, they make up a whole
which is extremely simple.

Man is the only animal whose actions are uncertain, who
hesitates, gropes about and lays plans in the hope of success
and the fear of failure. He is alone in realizing that he is
subject to illness, alone in knowing that he must die. The
rest of nature goes on its expanding course in absolute tran-
quillity. Although plants and animals are the sport of chance,
they rely on the passing hour as they would on eternity. We
drink in something of this unshakable confidence during a
country walk, from which we return quieted and soothed. But
this is not saying enough. Of all the creatures that live in
society, man alone can swerve from the social line by giving
way to selfish preoccupations when the common good is at
stake; in all other societies the interests of the individual are
inexorably co-ordinate with and subordinate to the general
interest. This twofold shortcoming in man is the price paid
for intelligence. Mao^cannot exert. lus, faculty of thought
without imagining an uncertain future, which rouses his fears
and his hopes. He cannot think about what nature demands
of him, in so far as she has made a social being of him, with-
out saying to himself that he might often find it more profit-
able to ignore others and to think of himself alone. In both
cases there would be a break of the normal, natural order of
things. And yet it was nature who ordained intelligence, who
placed it at the end of one of the two great lines of evolution
as a counterpart to the highest form of instinct, which is the
terminal point of the other. It is impossible that she should
not have taken the precaution to see that a condition of order,
having been disturbed ever so slightly by intelligence, should
tend to re-establish itself automatically. As a matter of fact,

ii GENERAL FUNCTION OF STATIC RELIGION 175

the myth-making function, which belongs to intelligence, and
which yet is not pure intelligence, has precisely this object.
Its role is to elaborate that religion we have been dealing
with up to now, that which we call static, and of which we
should say that it was natural religion," ifThe term were not
used in another sense. We have then only to sum up what we
have said to define this religion in clear terms. It is a defensive
reaction of nature against what might be depressing for the
individual, and dissolvent for society, in the exercise of intelligence.
Let us conclude with two remarks, to forestall two mis-
understandings. When we say that one of the functions of
religion, as it was^ordained by nature, is to. maintain social
life, we do not mean by this that there should be solidarity
between such a religion and morality. History is witness to
the contrary. To sin has always been to offend the deity; but
the deity has by no means always been offended by immorality
or even crime; there have been cases where he has prescribed
them. True, humanity seems in general to have wished its
gods to be good; it has often placed the different virtues under
their patronage; it may even be that the coincidence we pointed
out between original morality and primeval religion, both
alike rudimentary, has left in the depths of the human soul
the vague ideal of a more developed morality and an organized
religion dependent the one on the other. It is none the less
true that morality has taken definite shape along its own lines,
that religions have evolved along theirs, and that men have
always accepted their gods from tradition without asking
them for a certificate of good conduct, nor expecting them to
guarantee the moral order. But a distinction must be drawn
between social obligations of a very general character, without
which no life in common would be possible, and the particular
concrete social tie which causes the members of a particular
social community to be intent on its preservation. The first
have little by little emerged from the confused background
of customs which we have found at the outset; they have
emerged through purification and simplification, through
abstraction and generalization, to form a social morality. But
what binds together the members of a given society is tradi-

176 STATIC RELIGION CH.

'tion, the need and the determination to defend the group
against other groups and to set it above everything. To pre-
serve, to tighten this bond is incontestably one aim of the
religion we have found to be natural; it is common to the
members of a group, it associates them intimately with each
other in rites and ceremonies, it disfhiguishes the group from
other groups, it guarantees the success of the common enter-
prise and is an assurance against the common danger. The
fact that religion, such as it issued from the hands of nature,
has simultaneously fulfilled, to use the language of the day,
the two functions moral and national, appears to us unques-
tionable, for these two functions were inevitably undifferenti-
ated in rudimentary societies where custom existed alone.
But that societies, as they developed, should have carried
religion with them in the second direction, will be easily
understood by reference to what we have just explained. In
fact, the conclusion might have been reached immediately
considering that the human societies, at the end of one of the
great lines of biological evolution, form the counterpart to
the most perfectly developed animal societies, placed at the
extremity of the other great line, and that the myth-making
function, though not an instinct, plays in human societies a
part exactly corresponding to that of instinct in these animal
societies.

Our second remark, which we might well refrain from
making after all we have so often repeated, concerns the mean-
ing we give to the "intention of nature", an expression we
have used in speaking of "natural religion". As a matter of
fact, we were dealing less with this religion itself than with
the effect it produced. There is an impetus of life which rushes
through matter and wrests from it what it can, for that very
reason dispersing itself on its way. At the extremity of the
two main lines of evolution thus established lie intelligence
and instinct. Precisely because intelligence is a success, as
indeed instinct is too, it cannot be posited without the ac-
companiment of a tendency to eliminate any obstacle to the
production of its full effect. This tendency forms with intel-
ligence, as with all presupposed by intelligence, an undivided

n GENERAL FUNCTION OF STATIC RELIGION 177

whole, which becomes divisible when coming within the scope
of our faculty which is entirely relative to the intelligence
itself of perception and analysis. Let us revert to what has
been said about the eye and sight. We have the act of seeing,
which is simple, and we have an infinity of elements, and of
reciprocal actions of these elements on each other, by means
of which the anatomist and the physiologist reconstitute that
simple act. Elements and actions express analytically and so
to speak negatively, being resistances opposed to resistances,
the indivisible act, alone positive, which nature has effectively
obtained. In the same way the anxieties of man, cast upon
this earth, and the temptations the individual may have to
put his interests before those of the community anxieties
and temptations which are peculiar to an intelligent being
could lend themselves to endless enumeration. Indefinite
in number also are the forms of superstition, or rather of
static religion, which resist these resistances. But the com-
plexity vanishes if we place man back in nature as a whole, if
we consider that intelligence is apt to be an obstacle to the
serenity we find everywhere else, and that the obstacle must
be surmounted, the balance restored. Regarded from this
point of view, which is that of a genesis and no longer that of
an analysis, all the elements of disquiet and weakness entailed
in the application of intelligence to life, with all the peace
brought by religions, become a perfectly simple thing. Unrest
and myth-making counteract and nullify each other. In the
eyes of a god, looking down from above, the whole would
appear indivisible, like the perfect confidence of flowers un-
folding to the spring.

.CHAPTER III

DYNAMIC RELIGION

LET us cast a glance backward at Life, this life which we had
previously followed in its development up to the point where
religion was destined to emerge from it. A great current of
creative energy is precipitated into matter, to wrest from it
what it can. At most points, remember, it carne to a stop;
these stops are equivalent, in our eyes, to the phenomena of
so many living species, that is to say, of organisms in which
our perception, being essentially analytical and synthetic, dis-
tinguishes a multitude of elements combining to fulfil a multi-
tude of functions; yet the work of organization was but the
step itself, a simple act, like the making of a footprint, which
instantly causes a myriad grains of sand to cohere and form
a pattern. Along one of these lines, the one along which it
succeeded in going furthest, we might have thought that this
vital energy, carrying the best of itself with it, would go
straight on; but it swerved inward, and the whole circle
reformed: certain creatures emerged whose activity ran in-
definitely in the same circle, whose organs were ready-made
instruments and left no room for the ceaselessly renewed
invention of tools, whose consciousness lapsed into the
somnambulism of instinct instead of bracing itself and revital-
izing itself into reflective thought. Such is the condition of
the individual in those insect societies where organization is
highly perfected, but the effect of it is sheer automatism.

The creative effort progressed successfully only along that
line of evolution which ended in man. In its passage through
matter, consciousness assumed in that case, as it were from
a mould, the shape of tool-making intelligence. And inven-
tion, which carries reflexion with it, was at liberty to develop.

But intelligence was not without its dangers. Up to that
point, all living creatures had drunk greedily of the cup of

178

CH.III TWO MEANINGS OF THE WORD RELIGION 179

life. They lapped up with relish the honey which nature had
smeared on the rim; they were prepared to gulp down the
rest blindly. Not so intelligence, which peered into the bottom
of the cup. For the intelligent being was not living in the present
alone; there can be no reflexion without foreknowledge, no
foreknowledge without apprehension, no apprehension with-
out a momentary slackening of the attachment to life. Above
all, there is no humanity without society, and society demands
of the individual an abnegation which the insect, in its auto-
matism, carries to the point of an utter obliviousness of self.
Reflexion cannot be relied upon to keep up this selflessness.
Intelligence, except it be that of a suble utilitarian philosopher,
would more likely counsel egoism. Thus, from two directions
it called for a counterpoise. Or rather it was already provided
with one, for nature, we repeat, does not make her creatures
piecemeal; what is multiple in its manifestation may well be
simple in its genesis. A new species coming on to the scene
brings with it, in the indivisibility of the act creating it, all
the elements that impart life to it. The very check of the
creative impetus which has expressed itself in the creation of
our species has provided, along with intelligence, within
human intelligence, the myth-making function that contrives
the pattern of religions. That then is the office, that is the
significance of the religion we have called static or natural.
Religion is that element which, in beings endowed with
reason, is called upori to make good any deficiency of attach- ,
ment to life.

It is true that the possibility of another solution at once
occurs to the mind. Static religion, such as we find it when it
stands alone, attaches man to life, and consequently the
individual to society, by telling him tales on a par with those
with which we lull children to sleep. Of course they are not
like other stories. Being produced by the myth-making func-
tion in response to an actual need and not for mere pleasure,
they counterfeit reality as actually perceived, to the point of
making us act accordingly: other creations of the imagination
have this same tendency, but they do not demand our com-
pliance; they can remain just ideas; whereas the former are

i8o DYNAMIC RELIGION CH.

ideo-motory. They are none the less myths, which critical
minds, as we have seen, often accept in fact, but which they
should, by rights, reject. The active, moving principle, whose
mere stopping at an extreme point expresses itself in mankind,
doubtless requires of all created species that they cling to life.
But, as we have previously shown, if this principle produces
all species in their entirety, as a tree thrusts out on every side
branches which end in buds, it is the depositing, in matter,
of a freely creative energy, it is man, or some other being of
like significance we do not say of like form which is the
explanation of the entire process of evolution. The whole
might have been vastly superior to what it is, and this is
probably what happens in worlds where the current rushes
through matter less refractory than ours: just as the current
might never have found a free outlet even to this inadequate
extent in which case the quality and quantity of creative
energy represented by the human species would never have
been released at all on our planet. But whichever way we look
at it, life is a thing at least as desirable, even more desirable,
to man than to the other species, since the latter receive at
as the effect, produced in passing, by the creative energy,
whereas in man life is that successful effort itself, however
precarious and incomplete this success may be. This being so,
why should man not recover the confidence he lacks, or which
has perhaps been undermined by reflexion, by turning back
for fresh impetus, in the direction whence that impetus came?
Not through intelligence, at least not through intelligence
alone, could he do so: intelligence would be more likely to
proceed in the opposite direction; it was provided for a
definite object, and when it attempts speculation on a higher
plane, it enables us, at the most, to conceive possibilities, it
does not attain any reality. But we know that all around
intelligence there lingers still a fringe of intuition, vague and
evanescent. Can we not fasten upon it, intensify it, and above
all, consummate it in action, for it has become pure contem-
plation only through a weakening in its principle, and, if we
may put it so, by an abstraction practised on its own sub-
stance?

in WHY WE USE ONE WORD 181

A soul strong enough, noble enough to make this effort
would not stop to ask whether the principle with which it is
now in touch is the transcendant cause of all things or merely
its earthly delegate. It would be content to feel itself pervaded,
though retaining its own personality, by a being immeasur-
ably mightier than itself, just as an iron is pervaded by the
fire which makes it glow. Its attachment to life would hence-
forth be its inseparability from this principle, joy in joy, love
of that which is all love. In addition it would give itself to
society, but to a society comprising all humanity, loved in the
love of the principle underlying it. The confidence which static
religion brought to man would thus be transfigured: no more
thought for the morrow, no more anxious heart-searching;
materially the object would no longer be worth while, and
morally would take on too high a significance. Now detach-
ment from each particular thing would become attachment
to life in general. But should we, in such a case, still speak of
religion? Or were we right to have used the word before for
all the preceding argument? Are not the two things so different
as to exclude each other, and to make it impossible to call
them by the same name?

Yet there are many reasons for using the word religion in
both cases. In the first place mysticism for that is what we
have in mind may, it is true, lift the soul to another plane:
it none the less ensures for the soul, to a pre-eminent degree,
the security and the serenity which it is the function of static
religion to provide. But we must above all bear in mind that
pure mysticism is a rare essence, that it is generally found in a
diluted form, that even then it still gives to the substance
with which it mingles its colour and fragrance, and that it
must be taken together with the substance, to be regarded as
practically inseparable from it, if it is to be observed in its
active state since it was in this state that it finally imposed
its sway upon the world. Looking at it from this angle, we
should perceive a series of transitions, and, as it were, differ-
ences of degree, whereas really there is a radical difference of
nature. Let us go back briefly over each of these points.

In defining mysticism by its relation to the vital impetus,

182 DYNAMIC RELIGION CH.

we have implicitly admitted that true mysticism is rare. We
shall deal presently with its significance and its value. Let
us confine ourselves for the moment to noting that it lies,
according to the above, at a point which the spiritual current,
in its passage through matter, probably desired to reach _biit
could not. For it makes light of obstacles with which nature
has hacLta. jcome^.tQ..texna& and, on the other hand, we can
only understand the evolution of life, setting aside any by-
paths it has been compelled to follow, if we view it as seeking
for something beyond its reach, something to which the great
mystic attains. If all men, if any large number of men, could
have soared as high as this privileged man, nature would not
have stopped at the human species, for such a one is in fact
more than a man. The same can be said of other forms of
genius: they are one and all rare. It is not by chance, then,
it is by reason of its very essence that true mysticism is
exceptional.

But when it does call, there is in the innermost being of
most men the whisper of an echo. Mysticism reveals, or
rather would reveal to us, if we actually willed it, a marvellous
prospect: we do not, and in most cases we could not, will it;
we should collapse under the strain. Yet the spell has worked;
and just as when an artist of genius has produced a work which
is beyond us, the spirit of which we cannot grasp, but which
makes us feel how commonplace were the things we used to
admire, in the same way^tatic religion, though it may still Jbe
there, is no longer what it was, above all it no longer dares tp
assert itself, when truly great mysticism comes on the scene.
To static religion, mainly at any rate, humanity^mll still turn
for the support of which it is in need; it will leave the myth-
making function, remoulding it as best it can, to go on with
its work; in a word, man's confidence in life will remain much
the same as it was ordained by nature. But he will sincerely
feign to have sought and indeed to some extent to have found
that contact with the very principle of nature which expresses
itself in quite a different attachment to life, in a transfigured
confidence. Incapable of rising to these heights, he will go
through the motions, assume the appropriate attitudes and

in WHY WE USE ONE WORD 183

in his speech reserve the foremost place for certain formulae
which he can never see filled with their whole meaning, the
whole operation being reminiscent of some ceremony where
certain chairs, reserved for high dignitaries, are standing
empty. Thi^jrnay arise a mixed religion, implying a new
direction given to the old, the more or less marked aspiration
of the ancient god, emanating from the myth-making func-
tion, to be merged into the God Who effectively reveals
Himself, Who illuminates and warms privileged souls with
His presence. Thus do we find interposed, as we were sug-
gesting, transitions and differences, ostensibly of degree,
between two things which are as a matter of fact radically
different in nature and which, at first sight, we can hardly
believe deserve the same name. The contrast is striking in
many cases, as for instance when nations at war each declare
that they have God on their side, the deity in question thus
becoming the national god of paganism, whereas the God
they imagine they are evoking is a God common to all man-
kind, the mere vision of Whom, could all men but attain it,
would mean the immediate abolition of war. And yet we should
not, on the strength of this contrast, disparage religions born
ojjj^ticjsm, which have generalized the use of its formulae
and yet have been unable to pervade all humanity with the
full measure of its spirit. It sometimes happens that wellnigh
empty formulae, the veriest magical incantations, contrive to
summon up here and there the spirit capable of imparting
substance to them. An indifferent schoolmaster, mechanic-
ally teaching a science created by men of genius, may awaken
in one of his pupils the vocation he himself has never pos-
sessed, and change him unconsciously into an emulator of
those great men, who are invisible and present in the message
he is handing on.

Yet there is a difference between the two cases, and if we
take it into account, we shall notice, in the matter of religion,
a gradual disappearance of the opposition between the static
and the dynamic, on which we have just insisted in order to
bring out the characteristics of the two religions. The great
majority of men may very well know practically nothing

184 DYNAMIC RELIGION CH.

about mathematics and yet admire the genius of a Descartes
or a Newton. But those who have, from afar off, bowed their
heads to the mystic word, because they heard a faint echo of
it within themselves, . will not remain indifferent to its mes-
sage. If they already have their different faiths, from which
they will not or cannot break away, they will persuade them-
selves that they are effecting a transformation of them, as
indeed they are: the same elements will subsist, but they will
be magnetized and by this very magnetizing process be
diverted into another direction. A religious historian will have
no difficulty in discovering in the material form of a vaguely
mystic belief, which has spread far and wide among mankind,
so many mythical and even magic elements. He will prove
thereby that there exists a static religion, natural to man, and
that human nature is unchanging. But, if he stops at that, he
will have overlooked something, and perhaps the essential.
At any rate he will, unwittingly perhaps, have bridged the
gulf between the static and the dynamic, and justified the use
of the same word in such widely different instances. He will
indeed be still dealing with a religion, but with a new one.

We shall be still more convinced of this, we shall see from
another angle how these two religions are antagonistic and ,
yet come together, if we take into consideration the attempts
of the second to lodge within the first, preparatory to sup-
planting it. As a matter of fact, it is we who convert them into
attempts by an act of retrospection. They were, when they
occurred, complete and self-sufficient actions, and they have
only assumed the guise of initial preparatory efforts since' the
day when ultimate success transformed them into partial
failures, by virtue of the mysterious power which the present
exerts over the past. They will none the less serve us to mark
the intervening stages, to analyse into its virtual elements the
indivisible act by which dynamic religion is posited, and at the
same time to show, by the manifest unity of direction of all
those efforts, which now prove to have been unsuccessful,
that the sudden leap which marked final achievement was in
no way fortuitous.

Among the tentative efforts leading to the mysticism which

in GREEK MYSTICISM 185

was to come, certain aspects of the pagan mysteries occupy a
foremost position. We must not allow ourselves to be led
astray by the term: there was nothing mystic about most of the
mysteries. They were connected with the established religion,
which considered it perfectly natural that they should exist
along with it. They glorified the same gods, or gods origin-
ating from the same myth-making function. They merely
strengthened the religious spirit among the initiate by adding
to it that satisfaction which men have always had in forming
little societies within the larger one, and setting themselves
up as privileged beings on the strength of an initiation kept
jealously secret. The members of these closed societies felt as
if they were nearer to the god upon whom they called, if only
because the performance of mythological scenes played a
greater part here than in the public ceremonies. In a certain
sense the god was present; the initiate shared to some extent
in his divinity. They could therefore hope for more and better
things in another life than the national religion held out to
them. But these were, most probably, nothing but ready-
made ideas imported from foreign lands: we know how
deeply the ancient Egyptians had always been preoccupied
with the fate of man after death, and we must remember the
evidence of Herodotus, according to which the Demeter of
the Eleusian mysteries and the Dionysos of Orphism were
transformations of Isis and Osiris; so that the celebration of
the mysteries, or at least what we know of it, discloses no
striking divergence from the public cult. At first sight, then,
ther6 would seem to be no more mysticism about this religion
than the other. But we must not confine ourselves to that
aspect, which was probably the only one to interest most of the
initiate. We must ask ourselves if some at least of these
mysteries did not bear the stamp of this or that great person-
ality whose spirit they claimed to recall to life. We must also
note the importance most of the authors give to scenes of
religious enthusiasm, where the soul was thought to become
really possessed by the god it invoked. In fact the most con-
spicuously alive of them, those which ended by attracting
into their orbit the mysteries of Eleusis themselves, were those

186 DYNAMIC RELIGION CH.

of Dionysos and his continuator, Orpheus. As a foreign god
from Thrace, Dionysos was by his violence a sharp contrast
to the serenity of the Gods upon Olympus. He was not
originally the god of wine, but he easily became so, because
the intoxication of the soul he produced was not unlike that
of wine. We know how William James was treated for having
described as mystical, or at least having regarded as such for
purposes of study, the condition induced by inhaling pro-
toxide of nitrogen. People took this to be a profanation. And
they would have been right, if the philosopher had made of
the "interior revelation" a psychical equivalent of the
protoxide, which would then have been, as the meta-
physicians say, the efficient and sufficient cause of the effect
produced. But in his eyes the intoxication was presumably
the occasion rather than the cause. The psychic disposition
was there, potentially, along with the others, only awaiting
a signal to express itself in action. It might have been evoked
spiritually by an effort made on its own spiritual level. But
it could just as well be brought about materially, by an in-
hibition of what inhibited it, by the removing of an obstacle,
and this effect was the wholly negative one produced by the
drug; the psychologist preferred making use of the latter,
which enabled him to obtain his result whenever he wished.
It is possible that no more important role attached to wine,
when its effect was compared to the Dionysiac frenzy. But
that is not the main point. What we want to find out is
whether this frenzy can be considered, in retrospect, and once
mysticism has come on the scene, as heralding certain
mystic states. In order to answer this question, we need but
glance at the evolution of Greek philosophy.

This evolution was purely rational. It carried human
thought to its highest level of abstraction and generalization.
It gave such strength and flexibility to the dialectic function
of the mind that even to-day for such training we go to
school with the Greeks. Yet two points must be noted. The
first is that at the origin of this great movement there was an
impulsion or a shock which was not of a philosophic nature.
The second is that the doctrine in which the movement

in GREEK MYSTICISM 187

culminated, and which brought Greek thought to a climax,
claimed to transcend pure reason. There is no doubt that the
Dionysiac frenzy was continued into Orphism, and that
Orphism went on into Pythagoreanism: well, it is to this latter,
perhaps even to the former, that the primary inspiration of
Platonism goes back. We know in what an atmosphere of
mystery, in the Orphic sense of the word, the platonic myths
were wrapped, and how the theory of ideas itself was inclined,
by a covert sense of affinity, towards the Pythagorean theory
of numbers. True, no influence of this kind is noticeable in
Aristotle and his immediate successors; but the philosophy of
Plotinus, in which the development culminates, and which
owes as much to Aristotle as it does to Plato, is unquestion-
ably mystic. If it has undergone the influence of Eastern
thought, so very much alive in the Alexandrine world,
this occurred without the knowledge of Plotinus him-
self, who thought he was merely condensing all Greek
philosophy, with the whole object of opposing it to foreign
doctrines. Thus, to sum up, there was in the beginning a
leaven of Orphism, and at the end a metamorphosis of
dialectics into mysticism. From this the conclusion might be
drawn that it was an extra-rational force which had caused
this rational development and carried it to its culmination at
a point beyond reason. In the same way the slow, steady
phenomena of sedimentation, which alone are visible to us, are
the outcome of invisible seismic forces which, by heaving up
at certain times the earth's crust, start the sedimentary
activity in a given direction. But another interpretation is
possible; and we are inclined to think it more probable. We
may suppose that the development of Greek thought was
solely the work of reason, and that, alongside and independent
of it, there occurred at rare intervals in certain predisposed
souls an effort to strike out, beyond the limits of intelligence,
in search of a vision, a contact, the revelation of a transcend-
ant reality. This effort may never have attained its object,
but each time, just as it was nearly spent, it handed on to
dialectics what remained of itself, rather than disappear en-
tirely; and thus, with the same expenditure of energy, a fresh

jfi&- DYNAMIC RELIGION CH.

attempt could not fail to reach a more distant goal, intelli-
gence being caught up again at a more advanced point of
philosophic development, the latter having in the interval
acquired greater elasticity and revealing a greater degree of
mysticism. We do, as a matter of fact, see a first wave, purely
Dionysiac, merging into Orphism, which was of a higher
intellectual character; a second wave, which we might call
Orphic, led to Pythagoreanism, that is to say, to a distinct
philosophy; in its turn Pythagoreanism transmitted some-
thing of its spirit to Platonism, and the latter, having adopted
it, in time expanded naturally into Alexandrine mysticism.
But in whatever form we imagine the relation between the
two currents, the one intellectual, the other extra-intellectual,
it is only by placing ourselves at the terminal point that we
can call the latter supra-intellectual or mystic, and regard as
mystic an impulsion which originated in the mysteries.

It remains to be seen, in this case, whether the final stage
of the movement was complete mysticism. One may give
words whatever connotation one likes, provided one begins
by defining that meaning. In our eyes, the ultimate end of
mysticism is the establishment of a contact, consequently of a
partial coincidence, with the creative effort of which life is
the manifestation. This effort is of God, if not God himself.
The great mystic is to be conceived as an individual being,
capable of transcending the limitations imposed on the species
by its material nature, thus continuing and extending the
divine action. Such is our definition. We are free to posit it,
provided we ask ourselves whether it ever finds its applica-
tion, and then whether it fits such and such a particular case.
As regards Plotinus, there is no doubt about the answer. It
was granted to him to look upon the promised land, but not
to set foot upon its soil. He went as far as ecstasy, a state in
which the soul feels itself, or thinks it feels itself, in the
presence of God, being irradiated with His light; he did not
get beyond this last stage, he did not reach the point where,
as contemplation is engulfed in action, the human will be-
comes one with the divine will. He thought he had reached
the summit: in his eyes, to go further would have meant to

in ORIENTAL MYSTICISM 189

go downhill. This is what he expressed in language of rare
beauty, yet which is not the language of thoroughgoing
mysticism. "Action", he said, "is a weakening of contempla-
tion." 1 Therein he remains faithful to Greek intellectualism,
he even sums it up in a striking formula; and at any rate he
did contrive to impregnate it with mysticism. In short,
mysticism, in the absolute sense in which we have agreed to
take the word, was never attained by Greek thought. No
doubt it would like to have come into being; as a mere
virtuality, it knocked more than once at the door. The door
opened wider and wider, but never wide enough for mysticism
wholly to enter.

There is a radical distinction, in this case, between the
mystical and the dialectical; they only come together at long
intervals. Elsewhere, on the contrary, they have been con-
stantly intermingled, in appearance helping each other, per-
haps in actual fact mutually preventing each other from
attaining full maturity. This is what appears to have happened
in Hindu thought. We shall not engage in any profound study
of it nor sum it up in its essentials. Its development extends
over a considerable period of time. Being both a philosophy
and a religion, it has varied with time and place. It is expressed
in a language some of whose many shades of meaning prob-
ably escape even those who know it best. Moreover, the words
of this language have by no means always retained the same
sense, even supposing that sense to have been always a
precise one, or to have ever been so. But, for our purpose,
a glance at the doctrine as a whole will suffice. And since, to
obtain this bird's-eye view, we must inevitably content our-
selves with piling up and trying to blend together views which
have been held by experts, by picking out these lines which
coincide we shall stand a fair chance of not going far wrong.

Let us first remark that India has always practised a
religion similar to that of ancient Greece. Gods and spirits
played the same parts as they did elsewhere. Rites and
ceremonies were similar. Sacrifice was an extremely important

els
\6yov rriv 7i7>aij> Troioiwrcu (Enn. III. viii. 4).

i 9 o DYNAMIC RELIGION CH.

element. These cults persisted through Brahmanism, Jainism,
and Buddhism. How were they compatible with a teaching
such as that of the Buddha? We must note that Buddhism,
which came to deliver man, believed that the gods too
needed to be delivered. It therefore treated men and gods as
creatures of the same $pecies, subject to the same laws of fate.
This is easily conceivable in a hypothesis such as ours: man
lives naturally in societies, and, as the result of a natural
function, which we have called myth-making, he surrounds
himself with phantasmic beings of his own creation, who live a
life akin to his own, on a higher plane, but bound up with
his own; such is the religion we regard as natural. Did the
thinkers of India ever see things in this light? It is hardly
likely. But any mind that sets out on the mystic way, beyond
the city gates, feels more or less distinctly that he is leaving
men and gods behind him. And this very fact makes him see
them intermingled.

Now, just how far did Hindu thought progress in this direc-
tion? We are considering, of course, ancient India only, alone
with herself, untouched by the influences which have since
been brought to bear on her by Western civilization, or by the
impulse to resist them. For, be it static or dynamic, we take
religion at its origins. We have found that the first was fore-
shadowed in nature; we see now that the second is a leap
beyond nature, and we study the leap in those cases where the
impetus was insufficient or thwarted. The Hindu soul seems
to have striven towards this impetus in two different ways.

One of them is at the same time of a physiological 'and
psychological character. Its remotest origin is to be found in
a practice common to Hindus and Iranians, previous, there-
fore, to their separation: the recourse to an intoxicating drink
which they both call soma. It produced a divine rapture,
somewhat like that which the devotees of Dionysos sought in
wine. Later came a set of practices designed to inhibit all
feeling, to dull mental activity, in a word to induce states
similar to hypnosis; these became systematized into the yoga.
Should this be called mysticism in our sense of the word?
There is nothing mystical in hypnotic states as such, but they

in ORIENTAL MYSTICISM 19!

may become so, or at least herald true mysticism and pave
the way for it, through the suggestions which creep into them.
And they will become so very easily, their form will be pre-
disposed to fill out with this matter, if they already entail
visions, ecstasies, thus suspending the critical functions of
intelligence. Such must have been, in one aspect at least, the
significance of the practices which culminated in yoga. Here
mysticism was no more than outlined; but a more marked
mysticism, a purely spiritual concentration, could utilize the
yoga in its material elements, and by that very operation
spiritualize it. In fact, the yoga seems to have been, at different
times, and in different places, a more popular form of mystic
contemplation, or else a complete system which included this
contemplation.

We must ascertain then what this contemplation was, as
also what connexion there can have been between -it and
mysticism as we understand it. From the most remote times,
the Hindu speculated on being in general, on nature, on life.
But his effort, sustained through many centuries, has not led,
like the effort of the Greek philosophers, to a knowledge
susceptible, as was Greek science, of unlimited development.
The reason lies in the fact that to him knowledge was always
rather a means than an end. The problem for him was to
escape from life, which he felt to be unremitting cruelty. And
suicide would not have provided this escape, for the soul has
to pass into another body after death, and this would have
meant a perpetual round of living and suffering. But from
the very beginnings of Brahmanism, he drifted into the belief
that deliverance could be won by renunciation. This renuncia-
tion was absorption in the whole as well as in self. Buddhism,
which gave a new turn to Brahmanism, did not modify it in
essentials. It made it, above all, into something much more
elaborate. Till then human experience had shown indeed that
life meant suffering; the Buddha worked back to the cause of
this suffering; he found it in desire of every kind, in the
craving for life. Thus the road to deliverance could be more
accurately traced. Brahmanism, Buddhism, even Jainism,
therefore preached with increasing vehemence the extinction

igz DYNAMIC RELIGION CH.

of the will to live, and this preaching strikes us at first as a
call on intelligence, the three doctrines differing only in a
greater or lesser degree of intellectuality. But on looking
closer, we perceive that the conviction they aimed at implant-
ing was far from being a purely intellectual state. Already in
antique Brahmanism it was neither by reasoning nor by study
that the ultimate conviction was obtained; it consisted in a
vision, passed on by him who had seen. Buddhism, more
philosophical in one aspect, is still more mystical in the other.
The state towards which it guides the soul is beyond joy and
pain, beyond consciousness. It is by a series of stages, and by
a whole system of mystical discipline that it leads to Nirvana,
to the abolition of desire during life, and of Karma after
death. We must not forget that the origin of the Buddha's
mission lies in the illumination that came to him in his early
youth. Everything in Buddhism which can be put into words
can doubtless be considered as a philosophy; but the essential
is the final revelation, transcending both reason and speech.
It is the conviction, gradually neared and suddenly attained,
that the goal is reached: man's sufferings, the only certainty,
and consequently the only living thing in life, are over. If we
consider that we are here dealing, not with a theoretical view,
but with an experience closely resembling ecstasy, that in an
effort at oneness with the creative impetus a soul might in-
deed take the path thus described and only fail because it
stopped half-way, dangling all dizzy in the void between two
activities, between the human life it has left behind and the
divine life it has not reached, then we shall not hesitate to see
mysticism in the Buddhist faith. But we shall understand why
it is not complete mysticism. This would be action, creation,
love.

Not that Buddhism ignored charity. On the contrary it
recommended it in the most exalted terms. And it joined
example to precept. But it lacked warmth and glow. As a
religious historian very justly puts it, it Knew nothing "of the
complete and mysterious gift of self". Let us add and it
comes perhaps to the same thing that it did not believe in
the efficacy of human action. It had no faith in such action.

in ORIENTAL MYSTICISM 193

And faith alone can grow to power and move mountains. A
complete mysticism would have reached this point. It is per-
haps to be met with in India, but much later. That enthusi-
astic charity, that mysticism comparable to the mysticism of
Christianity, we find in a Ramakrishna or a Vivekananda, to
take only the most recent examples. But Christianity, and this
is just the point, had come into the world in the interval.
Its influence on India gone over, as it happens, to Islamism
was superficial enough, but to the soul that is predisposed
a mere hint, the slightest token, is enough. But let us suppose
even that the direct action of Christianity, as a dogma, has
been practically nil in India. Since it has impregnated the
whole of Western civilization, one breathes it, like a perfume,
in everything which this civilization brings in its ^jfee. In-
dustrialism itself, as we shall try to prove, springs indirectly
from it. And it was industrialism, it was our Western civiliza-
tion which liberated the mysticism of a Ramakrishna or a
Vivekananda. This burning, active mystieisincould never
have been kindled in the days when the Hindurtelt he was
crushed by nature and when no human intervention was of
any avail. What could be done when inevitable famine doomed
millions of wretches to die of starvation? The principal origin
of Hindu pessimism lay in this helplessness. And it was
pessimism which prevented India from carrying her mysticism
to its full conclusion, since complete mysticism is action. But
then, with the advent of machines which increased the yield
of the land, and above all moved the products from place to
place, with the advent also of political and social organizations
which proved experimentally that the mass of the people was
not doomed, as though by some inexorable necessity, to a
life of grinding labour and bitter poverty, deliverance became
possible in an entirely new sense; the mystical impulse, if
operating anywhere with sufficient power, was no longer
going to be brought up against the impossibility of inter-
fering; it was no longer to be driven back into doctrines of
renunciation or the systematic practice of ecstasy; instead of
turning inwards and closing, the soul could open wide its
gates to a universal love. Now these inventions and organiza-

194 DYNAMIC RELIGION CH.

tion are essentially Western; it is they who, in this case, have
enabled mysticism to develop to its fullest extent and reach
its goal. We may therefore conclude that neither in Greece
nor in ancient India was there complete mysticism, in the
one case because the impetus was not strong enough, in the
other case because it was thwarted by material conditions or
by too narrow an intellectual frame. It is its appearance at a
given moment that enables us to follow in retrospect its pre-
paratory phases, just as the volcano, bursting into activity,
explains a long series of earthquakes in the past. 1

For complete mysticism is that of the great Christian
mystics. Let us leave aside, for the moment, their Christianity,
and study in them the form apart from the matter. There is
no doubt that most of them passed through states resembling
the various culminating phases of the mysticism of the
ancients. 2 But they merely passed through them: bracing
themselves up for an entirely new effort, they burst a dam;
they were then swept back into a vast current of life; from
their increased vitality there radiated an extraordinary energy,
daring, power of conception and realization. Just think of
what was accomplished in the field of action by a St. Paul, a
St. Teresa, a St. Catherine of Sienna, a St. Francis, a Joan
of Arc, and how many others besides! Nearly all this super-
abundant activity was devoted to spreading the Christian
faith. Yet there are exceptions, and the case of Joan of Arc
will suffice to show that the form can be separated from the
matter.

When we grasp that such is the culminating point of the
inner evolution of the great mystics, we can but wonder how

1 We are perfectly aware of the fact that there existed other mysticisms
in antiquity besides Neo-PIatonism and Buddhism. But, for the object we
have in view, we need only take those that advanced furthest.

2 M. Henri Delacroix, in a book which deserves to become a classic
(Etudes d'histoire et de psychologic du mysticisme, Paris, 1908), has called
attention to the essentially active element in the great mystics. Similar
ideas will be found in the remarkable works of Evelyn Underbill (Mysticism,
London, 1911; and The Mystic Way, London 1913). The latter author
connects certain of her views with those we expressed in UEvolution
Creatrice, and which we have taken up again, to carry them further, in the
present chapter. See, in particular, on this point, The Mystic Way.

in CHRISTIAN MYSTICISM 195

they could ever have been classed with the mentally diseased.
True, we live in a condition of unstable equilibrium; normal
health of mind, as, indeed, of body, is not easily defined. Yet
there is an exceptional, deep-rooted mental healthiness, which
is readily recognizable. It is expressed in a bent for action,
the faculty of adapting and re-adapting oneself to circum-
stances, in firmness combined with suppleness, in the
prophetic discernment of what is possible and what is not, in
a spirit of simplicity which triumphs over complications, in a
word, supreme good sense. Is not this exactly what we find in
the above-named mystics? And might they not provide us
with the very definition of intellectual vigour?

If they have been judged otherwise, it is because of the
abnormal states which are, with them, the prelude to the
ultimate transformation. They talk of their visions, their
ecstasies, their raptures. These are phenomena which also
occur in sick people and which are part of their malady. An
important work has lately appeared on ecstasy regarded as a
psycho-asthenic manifestation. 1 But there exist morbid states
which are imitations of healthy states; the latter are none the
less healthy, and the former morbid. A lunatic may think he
is an emperor; he will systematically introduce a Napoleonic
touch into his gestures, his words, his acts, and therein lies
his madness: does it in any way reflect upon Napoleon? In
just the same way it is possible to parody mysticism, and the
result will be mystic insanity: does it follow that mysticism
is insanity? Yet there is no denying that ecstasies, visions,
raptures are abnormal states, and that it is difficult to dis-
tinguish between the abnormal and the morbid. And such
indeed has been the opinion of the great mystics themselves.
They have been the first to warn their disciples against visions
which were quite likely to be pure hallucinations. And they
generally regarded their own visions, when they had any, as
of secondary importance, as wayside incidents; they had had
to go beyond them, leaving raptures and ecstasies far behind,
to reach the goal, which was identification of the human will
with the divine will. The truth is that these abnormal states,
1 Pierre Janet, De Vangoisse d Vextase.

196 DYNAMIC RELIGION CH.

resembling morbid states, and sometimes doubtless very
much akin to them, are easily comprehensible, if we only stop
to think what a shock to the soul is the passing from the static
to the dynamic, frojn the closed to the open, from everyday
life to mystic life. When the darkest depths of the soul are
stirred, what rises to the surface and attains consciousness
takes on there, if it be intense enough, the form of an image
or an emotion. The image is often pure hallucination, just
as the emotion may be meaningless agitation. But they both
may express the fact that the disturbance is a systematic re-
adjustment with a view to equilibrium on a higher level: the
image then becomes symbolic of what is about to happen,
and the emotion is a concentration of the soul awaiting trans-
formation. The latter is the case of mysticism, but it may
partake of the other; what is only abnormal may be accom-
panied by what is distinctly morbid; we cannot upset the
regular relation of the conscious to the unconscious without
running a risk. So we must not be surprised if nervous
disturbances and mysticism sometimes go together; we find
the same disturbances in other forms of genius, notably in
musicians. They have to be regarded as merely accidental.
The former have no more to do with mystical inspiration than
the latter with musical.

1 Shaken to its depths by the current which is about to sweep
it forward, the soul ceases to revolve round itself and escapes
for a moment from the law which demands that the species
and the individual should condition one another. It stops,
as though to listen to a voice calling. Then it lets itself go,
straight onward. It does not directly perceive the force that
moves it, but it feels an indefinable presence, or divines it
through a symbolic vision. Then comes a boundless joy, an
^-absorbing ecstasy or an enthralling rapture: God is there,
fand the soul is in God. Mystery is no more. Problems vanish,
darkness is dispelled; everything is flooded with light. But
for how long? An imperceptible anxiety, hovering above the
ecstasy, descends and clings to it like its shadow. This anxiety
alone would suffice, even without the phases which are to
come, to distinguish true and complete mysticism from what

HI CHRISTIAN MYSTICISM 197

was in bygone days its anticipated imitation or preparation.
For it shows that the soul of the great mystic does not stop
at ecstasy, as at the end of a journey. The ecstasy is indeed
rest, if you like, but as though at a station, where the engine
is still under steam, the onward movement becoming a vibra-
tion on one spot, until it is time to race forward again. Let
us put it more clearly: however close the union with God
may be, it could only be final if it were total. Gone, doubtless,
is the distance between the thought and the object of the
thought, since the problems which measured and indeed con-
stituted the gap have disappeared. Gone the radical separa-
tion between him who loves and him who is beloved: God is
there, and joy is boundless. Bjjtt thougkibe soul becomes, in
thought and feeling, absorbed in God, something of it remains
outside; that something, is the will, whence its action, if it|
acted, would quite naturally proceed. Its life, then, is not
yet divine. The soul is aware of this, hence its vague dis-
quietude, hence the agitation in repose which is the striking
feature of what we call complete mysticism: it means that the
impetus had acquired the momentum to go further, that
ecstasy affects indeed the faculty of seeing and feeling, but
that there is, besides, the will, which itself has to find its way
back to God. When this feeling has grown to the extent of
displacing everything else, the ecstasy has died out, the
soul stands alone again, and sometimes desolate enough.
Accustomed for a time to a dazzling light, it is now left blindly
groping in the gloom. It does not realize the profound meta-
morphosis which is going on obscurely within it. It feels that
it has lost much; it does not yet know that this was in order
to gain all. Such is the "darkest night" of which the great
mystics have spoken, and which is perhaps the most significant
thing, in any case the most instructive, in Christian mysticism.
The final phase, characteristic of great mysticism, is im-
minent. To analyse this ultimate preparation is impossible,
for the mystics themselves have barely had a glimpse of its
mechanism. Let us confine ourselves to suggesting that a
machine of wonderfully tempered steel, built for some extra-
ordinary feat, might be in a somewhat similar state if it

198 DYNAMIC RELIGION CH.

became conscious of itself as it was being put together. Its
parts being one by one subjected to the severest tests, some
of them rejected and replaced by others, it would have a feel-
ing of something lacking here and there, and of pain all over.
But this entirely superficial distress would only have to be
intensified in order to pass into the hope and expectation of a
marvellous instrument. The mystic soul yearns to become
this instrument. It throws off anything in its substance that
is not pure enough, not flexible and strong enough, to be
turned to some use by God. Already it had sensed the presence
of God, it had thought it beheld God in a symbolic vision, it
had even been united to Him in its ecstasy; but none of this
rapture was lasting, because it was mere contemplation; action
threw the soul back upon itself and thus divorced it from
God. Now it is God ....who is acting through the soul, in the
soul; the union is total, therefore final. At this point words
such as mechanism and instrument evoke images which are
better left alone. They could be used to give us an idea of the
preliminary work. They will teach us nothing of the final
result. Let us say that henceforth for the soul there is a
superabundance of life. There is a boundless impetus. There
is an irresistible impulse which hurls it into vast enterprises.
A calm exaltation of all its faculties makes it see things on a
vast scale only, and, in spite of its own weakness, produce
only what can be mightily wrought. Above all, it sees things
simply, and this simplicity, which is equally striking in the
words it uses and the conduct it follows, guides it through
complications which it apparently does not even perceive.
An innate knowledge, or rather an acquired ignorance, sug-
gest to it straightaway the step to be taken, the decisive act,
the unanswerable word. Yet effort remains indispensable,
endurance and perseverance likewise. But they come of
themselves, they develop of their own accord, in a soul acting
and acted upon, whose liberty coincides with the divine
activity. They represent a vast expenditure of energy, but this
energy is supplied as it is required, for the superabundance
of vitality which it demands flows from a spring which is the
very source of life. And now the visions are left far behind:

in CHRISTIAN MYSTICISM 199

* >.;-.

the divinity could not manifest itself from without to a soul
henceforth replete with its essence. Nothing remains to dis-
tinguish such a man outwardly from the men about him. He
alone realizes the change which has raised him to the rank of
adjutores Dei, " patients" in respect to God, agents in respect
to man. In this elevation he feels no pride. On the contrary,
great is his humility. How could he be aught but humble,
when there has been made manifest to him, in mute colloquy,
alone with Him who is Alone, through an emotion in which
his whole soul seemed to melt away, what we may call the
divine humility?

Even in the mysticism which only went as far as ecstasy,
that is to say contemplation, a certain line of action was
foreshadowed. Hardly had these mystics come back from
Heaven to earth, but they felt it incumbent on them to teach
mankind. They had to tell all men that what the world per-
ceived by the eyes of the body is doubtless real, but that there
is something else, and that this something is no mere possi-
bility or probability, like the conclusion of an argument, but
the certainty of a thing experienced: here is one who has seen,
who has touched, one who knows. And yet these were but
the tentative beginnings of an apostolate. The enterprise was
indeed discouraging: how could the conviction derived from
an experience be handed down by speech? And, above all,
how could the inexpressible be expressed? But these questions
do not even present themselves to the great mystic. He has
felt truth flowing into his soul from its fountain-head like an
active force. He can no more help spreading it abroad than
the sun can help diffusing its light. Only, it is not by mere
words that he will spread it.

For the love which consumes him is no longer simply the
love of man for God, it is the love of God for all men.Through
God, in the strength of God, he loves all mankind with a
divine love. This is not the fraternity enjoined on us by the
philosophers in the name of reason, on the principle that all
men share by birth in one rational essence: so noble an ideal
cannot but command our respect; we may strive to the best
of our ability to put it into practice, if it be not too irksome for

200 DYNAMIC RELIGION CH.

the individual and the community; we shall never attach
ourselves to it passionately. Or, if we do, it will be because
we have breathed in some nook or corner of our civilization
the intoxicating fragrance left there by mysticism. Would the
philosophers themselves have laid down so confidently the
principle, so little in keeping with everyday experience, of
an equal participation of all men in a higher essence, if there
had not been mystics to embrace all humanity in one simple
indivisible love? This is not, then, that fraternity which
started as an idea, whence an ideal has been erected. Neither
is it the intensification of an innate sympathy of man for man.
Indeed we may ask ourselves whether such an instinct ever
existed elsewhere than in the imagination of philosophers,
where it was devised for reasons of symmetry. With family,
country, humanity appearing as wider and wider circles, they
thought that man must naturally love humanity as he loves
his country and his family, whereas in reality the family
group and the social group are the only ones ordained by
nature, the only ones corresponding to instincts, and the
social instinct would be far more likely to prompt societies
to struggle against one another than to unite to make up
humanity. The utmost we can say is that family and social
feeling may chance to overflow and to operate beyond its
natural frontiers, with a kind of luxury value; it will never go
very far. The mystic love of humanity is a very different
thing. It is not the extension of an instinct, it does not origin-
ate in an idea. It belongs neither to the sensitive nor to the
rational. It is implicitly both and effectively much more.
For such a love lies at the very root of feeling and reason, as
of all other things. Coinciding with God's love for His handi-
work, a love which has been the source of everything, it
would yield up, to anyone who knew how to question it, the
secret of creation. It is still more metaphysical than moral in
its essence. What it wants to do, with God's help, is to com-
plete the creation of the human species and make of humanity
what it would have straightaway become, had it been able to
assume its final shape without the assistance of man himself.
Or to use words which mean, as we shall see, the same thing

in CHRISTIAN MYSTICISM 201

in different terms: its direction is exactly that of the vital
impetus; it is this impetus itself, communicated in its entirety
to exceptional men, who in their turn would fain impart it
to all humanity, and by a living contradiction change into
creative effort that created thing which is a species, and turn
into movement what was, by definition, a stop.

Can it succeed? If mysticism is to transform humanity,
it can only do so by passing on, from one man to another,
slowly, a part of itself. The mystics are well aware of this.
The great obstacle in their way is the same which prevented
the creation of a divine humanity. Manjias to earn his bread
with the sweat of his brow; in other words, humanity is an
animal species, and, as such, subject to the law which governs
the animal world and condemns the living to batten upon the
living. Since he has to contend for his food both with nature
and with his own kind, he necessarily expends his energies
procuring it; his intelligence is designed for the very object
of supplying him with weapons and tools, with a view to that
struggle and that toil. How then, in these conditions, could
humanity turn heavenwards its attention, which is essentially
concentrated on earth? If possible at all, it can only be
by using simultaneously or successively two very different
methods. The first would consist presumably in intensifying
the intellectual work to such an extent, in carrying intelli-
gence so far beyond what nature intended, that the simple
tool would give place to a vast system of machinery such as
might set human activity at liberty, this liberation being,
moreover, stabilized by a political and social organization
which would ensure the application of the mechanics to their
true object. A dangerous method, for mechanization, as it
developed, might turn against mysticism: nay more, it is
by an apparent reaction against the latter that mechanics
would reach their highest pitch of development. But there
are certain risks which must be taken: an activity of a superior
kind, which to be operative requires one of a lower order,
must call forth this activity, or at least permit it to function,
if necessary, even at the cost of having to defend itself against
it; experience shows that if, in the case of two contrary but

202 DYNAMIC RELIGION CH.

complementary tendencies, we find one to have grown until it
tries to monopolize all the room, the other will profit by this,
provided it has been able to survive; its turn will come again,
and it will then benefit by everything which has been done
without its aid, which has even been energetically developed
in specific opposition to it. However that may be, this means
could only be utilized much later; in the meantime an entirely
different method had to be followed. This consisted, not in
contemplating a general and immediate spreading of the
mystic impetus, which was obviously impossible, but in im-
parting it, already weakened though it was, to a tiny handful
of privileged souls which together would form a spiritual
society; societies of this kind might multiply; each one,
through such of its members as might be exceptionally gifted,
would give birth to one or several others; thus the impetus
would be preserved and continued, until such time as a pro-
found change in the material conditions imposed on humanity
by nature should permit, in spiritual matters, of a radical trans-
formation. Such is the method followed by the great mystics.
It was of necessity, and because they could do no more, that
they were particularly prone to spend their superabundant
energy in founding convents or religious orders. For the time
being they had no need to look further. The impetus of love
which drove them to lift humanity up to God and complete
the divine creation could only reach its end, in their eyes, with
the help of God whose instruments they were. Therefore all
their efforts must be concentrated on a very great, a very
difficult, but a limited task. Other efforts would be forth-
coming, indeed others had already been; they would all be
convergent, since God imparted to them their unity.

We have, indeed, simplified a great deal. To make things
clearer, and, above all, to take the difficulties one by one, we
have reasoned as though the Christian mystic, the bearer of
an inner revelation, had made his appearance in a humanity
utterly ignorant of such a thing. As a matter of fact, the men
to whom he speaks already have their religion, the same,
moreover, as his own. If he has visions, these visions show
him, in the form of images, what his religion had impressed

in CHRISTIAN MYSTICISM 203

on him in the form of ideas. His ecstasies, when they occurred,
united him to a God probably greater than anything he had
ever conceived, but who did nevertheless correspond to the
abstract descriptions with which religion had supplied him.
The question may even be asked if these abstract teachings
are not at the root of mysticism, and if the latter has ever
done more than go over the letter of the dogma, in order to
retrace it in characters of flame. The business of the mystics
would in this case be nothing but bringing to religion, in
order to restore its vital heat, something of the ardour with
which they were fired. Now, the man who professes such an
opinion will certainly have no difficulty in getting it accepted.
For the teaching of religion, like all teaching, is meant for
the intelligence, and anything of a purely intellectual order
can be brought within the reach of all men. Whether or no
we subscribe to religion, it is always possible to assimilate
it intellectually, if only by conceiving its mysteries to be
mysterious. On the contrary, mysticism means nothing,
absolutely nothing, to the man who has no experience of
it, however slight. Therefore everyone will appreciate that
mysticism may assert itself, original and ineffable, now and
then, in a pre-existing religion which is formulated in terms
of intelligence, whereas it is difficult to obtain acceptance
for the idea of a religion which only exists through mysticism,
and which is a mere extract of it an extract capable of being
formulated by the intellect and therefore grasped by all. It is
not for us to decide which of these interpretations conforms
to religious orthodoxy. Let us only say that from the psycho-
logist's point of view the second is much more likely than the
first. A doctrine JkdiiehJs but, a doctrine, lias a poor chance
indeed of giving birth to the glowing enthusiasm, the illumina-
tion, the faith that moves mountains. But grant this fierce
glow, and the molten matter will easily run into the mould
of a doctrine, or even become that doctrine as it solidifies.
We represent religion, then, as the crystallization, brought
about by a scientific process of cooling, of what mysticism
had poured, while hot, into the soul of man. Through religion
all men get a little of what a few privileged souls possessed

204 DYNAMIC RELIGION CH.

in full. True, it had to accept a great deal in order to get itself
accepted. Humanity really understands the new only when
it inherits much of the old. Now the old was, on the one
hand, what had been built up by the Greek philosophers, and,
on the other hand, what had been imagined by ancient reli-
gions. That Christianity received or derived a great deal from
both there is no doubt. It is permeated with Greek philosophy,
and has preserved many rites, many ceremonies, many beliefs
even, from the religion we called static or natural. It was in
its interest to do so, for its partial adoption of the Aristotelian
neo-Platonism enabled it to win over philosophic thought,
and its borrowings from ancient religions were bound to help
this new religion with its marked tendency in the oppo-
site direction, having hardly anything in common with past
religions but the name to become popular. But none of all
that was essential; the essence of the new religion was to be
the diffusion of mysticism. There is such a thing as high-level
popularization, which respects the broad outlines of scientific
truth, and enables ordinary cultivated minds to get a general
grasp of it, until the time comes when a greater effort reveals
it to them in detail, and, above all, allows them to penetrate
deeply into its significance. The propagation of the mystical
through religion seems to us something of the kind. In this
sense, religion is to mysticism what popularization is to
science.

What the mystic finds waiting for him, then, is a humanity
which has been prepared to listen to his message by other
mystics, invisible and present in the religion which is actually
taught. Indeed his mysticism itself is imbued with this
religion, for such was its starting-point. His theology will
generally conform to that of the theologians. His intelligence
and his imagination will use, to express in words what he
experiences, and in material images what he sees spiritually,
the teachings of the theologians. And this he can do easily,
since theology has tapped that very current whose source
is the mystical. Thus his mysticism is served by religion,
against the day when religion becomes enriched by his mysti-
cism. This explains the primary mission which he feels to be

in THE PROPHETS OF ISRAEL 205

entrusted to him, that of an intensifier of religious faith. He
takes the most crying needs first. In reality, the task of the
great mystic is to effect a radical transformation of humanity
by setting an example. The object could only be attained if
there existed in the end what should theoretically have existed
in the beginning, a divine humanity.

So then mysticism and religion are mutually cause and
effect, and continue to interact on one another indefinitely.
Yet there must have been a beginning. And indeed at the
origin of Christianity there is Christ. From our standpoint,
which shows us the divinity of all men, it matters little whether
or no Christ be called a man. It does not even matter that
he be called Christ. Those who have gone so far as to deny
the existence of Jesus cannot prevent the Sermon on the
Mount from being in the Gospels, with other divine sayings.
Bestow what name you like on their author, there is no deny-
ing that there was one. The raising of such problems does
not concern us here. Let us merely say that, if the great
mystics are indeed such as we have described them, they are
the imitators, and original but incomplete continuators, of
what the Christ of the Gospels was in all His glory.

He Himself may be considered as the continuator of the
prophets of Israel. There is no doubt but that Christianity
was a profound transformation of Judaism. It has been said
over and over again: a religion which was still essentially
national was replaced by a religion that could be made
universal. A God who was doubtless a contrast to all other
gods by His justice as well as by His power, but whose power
was used for His people, and whose justice was applied, above
all, to His own subjects, was succeeded by a God of love, a
God who loved all mankind. This is precisely why we hesitate
to classify the Jewish prophets among the mystics of antiquity:
Jehovah was too stern a judge, Israel and its God were not
close enough together for Judaism to be the mysticism which
we are defining. And yet no current of thought or feeling has
contributed so much as the thought and feeling of Jewish
prophets to arouse the mysticism which we call complete,
that of the Christian mystics. The reason is that, if other

206 DYNAMIC RELIGION CH.

currents carried certain souls towards a contemplative mysti-
cism and thereby deserved to be regarded as mystic, pure con-
templation they remained, and nothing more. To cover the
interval between thought and action an impetus was needed
and it was not forthcoming. We find this impetus in the
prophets: they longed passionately for justice; demanded it
in the name of the God of Israel; and Christianity, which
succeeded Judaism, owed largely to the Jewish prophets the
activity and efficiency of its mysticism, capable of marching
on to the conquest of the world.

If mysticism is really what we have just said it is, it must
furnish us with the means of approaching, as it were experi-
mentally, the problem of the existence and the nature of God.
Indeed we fail to see how philosophy could approach the
problem in any other way. Generally speaking, we look upon
an object as existing if it is perceived, or might be perceived.
Such an object is therefore presented in actual or virtual
experience. No doubt you may construct the idea of an object
or of a being, as the geometrician does for a geometrical figure;
but experience alone will decide whether it actually exists
outside the idea thus constructed. Now, you may assert that
this is just the question, and that the problem precisely is to
know whether a certain Being is not distinctive from all other
beings in that He stands beyond the reach of our experience,
and yet is as real as they are. Granted, for this once; although
an assertion of this kind, with its attendant arguments,
appears to me to imply a fundamental illusion. But then you
rnust prove that the Being thus defined, thus demonstrated,
is indeed God. You may argue that He is so by definition,
and that one is at liberty to confer any meaning one likes to
words, provided one defines them first. Granted again; but if
you attribute to a word a radically different meaning from
that which it usually bears, it will apply to a new object;
your reasoning no longer refers to the former one; it is there-
fore understood that you are speaking to us of something else.
This is precisely what occurs in most cases when the philo-
sopher speaks of God. So remote is this conception from the

in THE NATURE OF GOD 207

God most men have in mind that if, by some miracle, and
contrary to the opinion of philosophers, God as thus defined
should step down into the field of experience, none would
recognize Him. For religion, be it static or dynamic, regards
Him, above all, as a Being who can hold communication with
us: now this is just what the God of Aristotle, adopted with a
few modifications by most of his successors, is incapable of
doing. Without going deeply here into an examination of the
Aristotelian notion of the divinity, we shall simply say that
it strikes us as raising a double question: (i) Why did Aristotle
posit as first principle a motionless Mover, a Thought think-
ing itself, self-enclosed, operative only by the appeal of its
perfection? (2) Why, having posited this principle, did he call
it God? But in the one case as in the other the answer is easy:
the Platonic theory of Ideas ruled over the thought of Greece
and Rome ere ever it penetrated into modern philosophy;
and the relation of the first principle of Aristotle to the world
is the very same as that which Plato establishes between the
Idea and the thing. For anyone who sees in ideas nothing but
the product of social and individual intelligence, it is in no
way surprising that a limited number of immutable ideas
should correspond to the infinitely varied and changing
incidents of our experience; for we contrive to find resem-
blances between things in spite of their diversity, and to take
a stable view of them in spite of their instability; in this way
we obtain ideas which we can control, whereas the actual
things may elude our grasp. All this is the work of man. But
he who starts philosophizing when society is already well
advanced with its work, and finds the results stored up in
language, may be struck with admiration for this system of
ideas itself, which seems to set the standard for all things.
Are they not, in their immutability, models which things,
changing and shifting as they are, merely imitate? May they
not be true reality, and do not change and motion express
the unceasing and unsuccessful attempts of well-nigh non-
existent things, running, as it were, after themselves, to co-
incide with the immutability of the Ideas? It is therefore
understandable that, having placed above the world of the

208 DYNAMIC RELIGION CH.

senses a hierarchy of Ideas with at its apex the Idea of Ideas,
which was the Idea of Good, Plato should have judged that
the Ideas in general, and still more so the Good, acted through
the attractive power of their perfection. Now this is exactly
the sort of action that Aristotle ascribes to the Thought of
Thought, which seems indeed akin to the Idea of Ideas.
True, Plato did not identify this idea with God. The Demi-
urge of the TimaeuSy who organizes the world, is distinct
from the Idea of Good. But the Timaeus is a mythical dialogue;
the Demiurge has therefore only a semi-existence; and Aris-
totle, who abandons myths, surmises as coincident with the
Divinity a Thought which, so it would seem, is barely a
thinking Being, and which we should call rather Idea than
Thought. Thus the God of Aristotle has nothing in common
with the gods worshipped by the Greeks; nor has he much
more in common with the God of the Bible, of the Gospels.
Religion, whether static or dynamic, confronts the philosopher
with a God who raises totally different problems. Yet it is
to the former god that metaphysical thought has generally
attached itself, even at the price of investing him with attri-
butes incompatible with his essence. Why not have gone back^
to his origin? It would have seen him develop from the con-
centration of all ideas into one. Why not have gone on to
consider each of these ideas? It would have realized that they
were intended to pave the way for the action of society and
the individual on things, that society supplied them for this
purpose to the individual, and that to set up their quintessence
as a divinity is merely to deify the social. Why not, lastly,
have analysed the social conditions of this individual action,
and the nature of the work done by the individual with the
help of society? It would have seen that if, in order to simplify
the work and also to facilitate the co-operation, things are
first reduced to a few categories, or ideas, translatable into
words, each of these ideas stands for a stationary property or
state culled from some stage or other in the process of becom-
ing; the real is mobile, or rather movement itself, and we
perceive only continuities of change; but to have any action
on the real, and especially to perform the constructive task

in THE NATURE OF GOD 209

which is the natural object of human intelligence, we must
contrive to have halts here and there, just as we wait for a
momentary slowing down or standing still before firing at a
moving target. But these halts, each of which is really the
simultaneousness of two or more movements and not, as it
seems to be, a suppression of movement, these qualities
which are but snapshots of change, become in our eyes the
real and essential, precisely because they are what concerns
our action on things. Rest then becomes for us something
anterior and superior to movement, motion being regarded
only as agitation with a view to a standing still. Thus im-
mutability is rated higher than mutability, which implies a
deficiency, a lack, a quest of the unchanging form. Nay more, it
is by this gap between the point where a thing is and the
point where it should be, where it aspires to be, that move-
ment and change will be defined and even measured. On
this showing, duration becomes a debasement of being,
time a deprivation of eternity. This whole system of meta-
physics is involved in the Aristotelian conception of Deity.
It consists in deifying both the social work which paves the
way for language and the individual constructive work requir-
ing patterns and models: the eZ&o? (Idea or Form) is what
corresponds to this twofold work; the Idea of Ideas or Thought
of Thoughts is therefore Divinity itself. With the origin and
meaning of Aristotle's God thus traced back we can but
wonder how modern thinkers, when treating of the existence
and the nature of God, hamper themselves with insoluble
problems which only arise if God is studied from the Aris-
totelian point of view, and if they are pleased to call by that
name a being whom mankind has never dreamed of invoking.
Now, is mystical experience able to solve these problems?
It is easy to see the objections that such a notion will arouse.
We have disposed of those which consist in asserting that no
mystic is sound in the head and that all mysticism is a
pathological state. The great mystics, the only ones that we
are dealing with, have generally been men or women of
action, endowed with superior common sense: it matters
little that some of them had imitators who well deserved to

210 DYNAMIC RELIGION CH.

be called "crazy", or that there are cases when they them-
selves felt the effect of extreme and prolonged strain of mind
and will; many a man of genius has been in the same condi-
tion. But there is another series of objections, which it is
impossible to overlook. For it is alleged that the experiences
of the great mystics are individual and exceptional, that they
cannot be verified by the ordinary man, that they cannot
therefore be compared to a scientific experiment and cannot
possibly solve problems. There is a great deal to be said on
this point. In the first place, it is by no means certain that
a scientific experiment, or more generally an observation
recorded by science, can always be repeated or verified. In
the days when Central Africa was a terra incognita , geography
trusted to the account of one single explorer, if his honesty
and competence seemed to be above suspicion. The route of
Livingstone's journeys appeared for a long time on the maps
and atlases. You may object that verification was potentially,
if not actually, feasible, that other travellers could go and see
if they liked, and that the map based on the indications of one
traveller was a provisional one, waiting for subsequent explora-
tion to make it definitive. I grant this: but the mystic too has
gone on a journey that others can potentially, if not actually,
undertake; and those who are actually capable of doing so are
at least as many as those who possess the daring and energy
of a Stanley setting out to find Livingstone. Indeed, that is
an understatement. Along with the souls capable of following
the mystic way to the end there are many who go at least
part of the way: how numerous are those who take a few
steps, either by an effort of will or from a natural disposition!
William James used to say he had never experienced mystic
states; but he added that if he heard them spoken of by a man
who had experienced them "something within him echoed
the call". Most of us are probably in the same case. It is no
use invoking as evidence to the contrary the indignant pro-
tests of those who see nothing in mysticism but quackery and
folly. Some people are doubtless utterly impervious to mystic
experience, incapable of feeling or imagining anything of it.
But we also meet with people to whom music is nothing

in PHILOSOPHICAL VALUE OF MYSTICISM 211

but noise; and some of them will express their opinions of
musicians with the same anger, the same tone of personal
spite. No one would think of accepting this as an argument
against music. Let us leave, then, these merely negative
arguments and see whether the most superficial examination
of mystic experience will not incline us favourably towards it.
We must first note the fact that mystics generally agree
among themselves. This is striking in the case of the Christian
mystics. To reach the jjltimate identification with Gpd, they
go through a serie&^of. states. These may vary from mystic to
mystic, but there is a strong resemblance between them. In
any case, the path followed is the same, even admitting that
the stopping-places by the way are at different intervals.
They have in any case the same terminal point. In the de-
scriptions of the final state we find the same expressions, the
same images, the same comparisons, although the authors
were generally unknown to each other. It will be replied that
in some cases they had known one another, that furthermore
there is a mystic tradition, and that all mystics may have felt
its influence. We grant this, but the fact must be noted that
the great mystics give little thought to this tradition; each
one has his own originality, which is not intentional, which
he has not sought, but which we feel is of fundamental
importance to him; it means that he is the object of an ex-
ceptional favour, unmerited though it be. Now it may be
objected that a community of religion suffices to explain the
resemblance, that all Christian mystics have lived on the
Gospels, that they all received the same theological teaching.
But this would be to forget that, if the resemblance between
the visions is indeed explainable by a common religion, these
visions occupy but a small place in the lives of the great
mystics; they are soon left behind, and treated as if they
had been merely symbolical. As to theological teaching in
general, it is true that they seem to accept it with utter
docility, and in particular to obey their confessors; but, as
has been shrewdly remarked, "they obey themselves alone,
and a sure instinct leads them straight to the very man who
can be relied upon to guide them in the way they want to go.

212 DYNAMIC RELIGION CH.

If he should happen to depart from it, our mystics would not
hesitate to shake off his authority, and, on the strength of their
direct contact with the Deity, place their own liberty above
all else". 1 It would indeed be interesting at this point to study
closely the relations between the spiritual adviser and the
soul seeking counsel. It would be found that, of the two, he
that has meekly acquiesced in yielding to guidance has more
than once, no less meekly, become the guide. But this is not
for us the important point. All we want to make clear is that,
if external resemblances between Christian mystics may be
due to a common tradition or a common training, their deep-
seated agreement is a sign of an identity of intuition which
would find its simplest explanation in the actual existence of
the Being with whom they believe themselves to hold inter-
course. So much the more so, then, if we consider that the
other mysticisms, ancient or modern, go more or less far,
stopping at this or that stage, but all point in the same
direction.

Yet we may admit that mystical experience, left to itself,
cannot provide the philosopher with complete certainty. It
could only be absolutely convincing if he had come by
another way, such as a sensuous experience coupled with
rational inference, to the conclusion of the probable existence
of a privileged experience through which man could get
into touch with a transcendent principle. The occurrence in
mystics of just such an experience would then make it possible
to add something to the results already established, whilst
these established results would reflect back on to the mystical
experience something of their own objectivity. Experience
i^the only source of knowledge. But, since the intellectual
record of the Fact inevitably goes further than the raw fact,
all experiences are far from being equally conclusive and
from justifying the same certainty. Many lead us to merely
probable conclusions. Yet probabilities may accumulate, and
the sum-total be practically equivalent to certainty. We
have alluded elsewhere to those "lines of fact" each one but

1 M. de Montmorand, Psychologic des mystiques catholiques orthodoxes
(Paris, 1920), p. 17.

in PHILOSOPHICAL VALUE OF MYSTICISM 213

indicating the direction of truth, because it does not go
far enough: truth itself, however, will be reached if two of
them can be prolonged to the point where they intersect. A
surveyor measures the distance to an unattainable point by
taking a line on it, now from one, now from the other of two
points which he can reach. In our opinion this method of
intersection is the only one that can bring about a decisive
advance in metaphysics. By this means collaboration between
philosophers can be established; metaphysics, like science,
will progress by the gradual accumulation of results obtained,
instead of being a complete take-it-or-leave-it system, always
in dispute and always doomed to start afresh. Now it so
happens that a thorough study of a certain order of problems,
entirely different from religious problems, has led us to a
conclusion which makes probable the existence of a singular
privileged experience, such as a mystic experience. And, on
the other hand, the mystical experience, studied for its own
sake, supplies us with pointers that can be added and fitted to
the knowledge obtained in an entirely different field, by an
entirely different method. It is a case, then, of one supporting
and completing the other. Let us begin by the first point.

It was by following as closely as possible the evidence of
biology that we reached the conception of a vital impetus and
of a creative evolution. As we set it out at the beginning of the
last chapter, this conception was by no means a hypothesis,
such as can be found at the basis of any metaphysical system:
it was a condensation of fact, a summing up of summings up.
Now, whence came the impetus, and what was the principle
behind it? If it sufficed unto itself, what was it in itself, and
what meaning were we to ascribe to its manifestations as a
whole? To such questions the facts under consideration sup-
plied no direct answer; but we saw clearly from what direction
the answer might come. For the energy precipitated through
matter appeared to us, as it were, below or above conscious-
ness, in any case of the same order as consciousness. It had
had to get round many obstacles, squeeze itself through
others; above all, divide itself between diverging lines of
evolution: at the extremity of the two main lines we ulti-

2i4 DYNAMIC RELIGION CH.

mately found two modes of knowledge into which it had
resolved itself in order to materialize: the instinct of insects,
the intelligence of manl Instinct was intuitive; intelligence
reflected and reasoned. It is true that intuition had had to
debase itself to become instinct; it had become intent, as
though hypnotized, on the interest of the species, and what
had survived of its consciousness had assumed a somnam-
bulistic form. But just as there subsisted around animal
instinct a fringe of intelligence, so human intelligence pre-
served a halo of intuition. The latter, in man, had remained
fully disinterested and conscious, but it was only a faint glow
and did not radiate very far. Yet it is from this that the light
must come, if ever the inner working of the vital impetus
were to be made clear in its significance and in its object. For
this intuition was turned inward; and if, in a first intensi-
fication, it made us realize the continuity of our inner life, if
most of us went no further, a deeper intensification might
carry it to the roots of our being, and thus to the very principle
of life in general. Now is not this precisely the privilege of the
mystic soul?|

This brings us to what we have just stated as our second
point. The first question was to find out whether or no the
mystics were merely "queer", if the accounts of their experi-
ences were purely fanciful or not. But the question was soon
settled, at least as far as the great mystics were concerned.
The next thing was to find out whether mysticism was no
more than a more fervent faith, an imaginative form such as
traditional religion is capable of assuming in passionate souls,
or whether, while assimilating as much as it can from this
religion, while turning tolf'Iof"confirmation, while borrowing
itS~JUngiugelt-did,nQt possess an original content, drawn

independent^

es to tradition, to theology, to the Churches.
In the -first case, it must necessarily stand aloof from philo-
sophy, for the latter ignores revelation which has a definite
date, the institutions which have transmitted it, the faith that
accepts it: it must confine itself to experience and inference.
But, in the second case, it would suffice to take mysticism

in CREATION AND LOVE 215

unalloyed, apart from the visions, the allegories, the theo-
logical language which express it, to make it a powerful help-
meet to philosophical research. Of these two conceptions of
the relation that it maintains to religion, the second seems to
us indubitably the right one. We must then find out in what
measure mystic experience is a continuation of the experience
which led us to the doctrine of the vital impetus. All the
information with which it would furnish philosophy, philo-
sophy would repay in the shape of confirmation.

Let us first note that the mystics ignore what we have
called "false problems". It may perhaps be objected that
they ignore all problems, whether real or false, and this is true
enough. It is none the less certain that they supply us with an
implicit answer to questions which force themselves upon the
attention of philosophers, and that difficulties which should
never Have perplexed philosophy are implicitly regarded by
the mystic as non-existent. We have shown elsewhere that
part of metaphysics moves, consciously or unconsciously,
around the question why anything exists why matter, or
spirit, or God, rather than nothing at all? But the question
presupposes that reality fills a void, that underneath Being
lies nothingness, that dejure there should be nothing, that we
musT""ffiierefore explain why there is de facto something. And
this presupposition is pure illusion, for the idea of absolute
nothingness has not one jot more meaning than a square
circle. The absence of one thing being always the presence
of another which we prefer to leave aside because it is not
the thing that interests us or the thing we were expecting
suppression is never anything more than substitution, a
two-sided operation which we agree to look at from one side
only: so that the idea of the abolition of everything is self-
destructive, inconceivable; it is a pseudo-idea, a mirage con-
jured up by our imagination. But, for reasons we have
stated elsewhere, the illusion is natural: its source lies in the
depths of the understanding. It raises questions which are
the main origin of metaphysical anguish. Now, for a mystic
these questions simply do not exist, they are optical illusions
arising, in the inner world, from the structure of human

216 DYNAMIC RELIGION CH.

intelligence, they recede and disappear as the mystic rises
superior to the human point of view. And, for similar reasons,
the mystic will no more worry about the difficulties accumu-
lated by philosophy around the "metaphysical" attributes of
Deity: he has nothing to do with properties which are mere
negations and can only be expressed negatively; he believes
that he sees what God is, for him there is no seeing what God
is not. It is therefore on the nature of God, immediately
apprehended on the positive side, I mean on the side which
is perceptible to the eyes of the soul, that the philosopher
must question him.

The philosopher could soon define this nature, did he
wish to find a formula for mysticism. _G T od is love ? aruLthe
gbjfcct-o lave: herein lies the whole contribution of mysti-
cism. About this twofold love the mystic will never have done
enthusing. His description is interminable, because what he
wants to describe is ineffable. But what he does state clearly
is that divine love is not a thing of God: it is God Himself. It
is upon this point that the philosopher must fasten who holds
God to be a person, and yet wishes to avoid anything like a
gross assimilation with man. He will think, for example, of
the enthusiasms which can fire a soul, consume all that is
within it, and henceforth fill the whole space. The individual
then becomes one with the emotion; and yet he was never so
thoroughly himself; he is simplified, unified, intensified. Nor
has he ever been so charged with thought, if it be true, as we
have said, that there are two kinds of emotion, the one below
intellect, which is mere restlessness following upon a repre-
sentation, the other above intellect, preceding the idea, more
than idea, but which would burst into ideas if, pure soul that
it is, it chose to give itself a body. What is there more sys-
tematically architectonic, more reflectively elaborate, than a
Beethoven symphony? But all through the labour of arranging,
rearranging, selecting, carried out on the intellectual plane,
the composer was turning back to a point situated outside
that plane, in search of acceptance or refusal, of a lead, an
inspiration; at that point there lurked an indivisible emotion
which intelligence doubtless helped to unfold into music,

in CREATION AND LOVE 217

but which was in itself something more than music and
more than intelligence. Just the opposite of infra-intellectual
emotion, it remained dependent on the will. To refer back to
this emotion the artist had to make a constantly repeated
effort, such as the eye makes to rediscover a star which, as soon
as it is found, vanishes into the dark sky. An emotion of this
kind doubtless resembles, though very remotely, the sublime
love which is for the mystic the very essence of God. In any
case, the philosopher must bear this in mind when he com-
presses mystic intuition more and more in order to express it
in terms of intelligence.

He may not write music, but he generally writes books; and
the analysis of his own state of mind when he writes will help
him to understand how the love in which the mystics see the
very essence of divinity can be both a person and a creative
power. He generally keeps, when writing, within the sphere of
concepts and words. Society supplies ideas ready to hand,
worked out by his predecessors and stored up in the language,
ideas which he combines in a new way, after himself re-
shaping them to a certain extent so as to make them fit into
his combination. This method will always produce some more
or less satisfactory result, but still a result, and in a limited
space of time. And the work produced may be original and
vigorous; in many cases human thought will be enriched by
it. Yet this will be but an increase of that year's income;
social intelligence will continue to live on the same capital,
the same stock. Now there is another method of composition,
more ambitious, less certain, which cannot tell when it will
succeed or even if it will succeed at all. It consists in working
back from the intellectual and social plane to a point in the
soul from which there springs an imperative demand for
creation. The soul within which this demand dwells may
indeed have felt it fully only once in its lifetime, but it is
always there, a unique emotion, an impulse, an impetus
received from the very depths of things. To obey it com-
pletely new words would have to be coined, new ideas would
have to be created, but this would no longer be communi-
cating something, it would not be writing. Yet the writer

p

218 DYNAMIC RELIGION CH.

will attempt to realize the unrealizable. He will revert to the
simple emotion, to the form which yearns to create its matter,
and will go with it to meet ideas already made, words that
already exist, briefly social segments of reality. All along the
way he will feel it manifesting itself in signs born of itself, I
mean in fragments of its own materialization. How can these
elements, each unique of its kind, be made to coincide with
words already expressing things? He will be driven to strain
the words, to do violence to speech. And, even so, success can
never be sure; the writer wonders at every step if it will be
granted to him to go on to the end; he thanks his luck for
every partial success, just as a punster might thank the words
he comes across for lending themselves to his fun. But if he
does succeed, he will have enriched humanity with a thought
that can take on a fresh aspect for each generation, with a
capital yielding ever-renewed dividends, and not just with a
sum down to be spent at once. These are the two methods of
literary composition. They may not, indeed, utterly exclude
each other, yet they are radically different. The second one,
as providing the image of the creation of matter by form, is
what the philosopher must have in mind in order to conceive
as creative energy the love wherein the mystic sees the very
essence of God.

Has this love an object? Let us bear in mind that an emotion
of a superior order is self-sufficient. Imagine a piece of music
which expresses love. It is not love for any particular person.
Another piece of music will express another love. Here we
have two distinct emotional atmospheres, two different frag-
rances, and in both cases the quality of love will depend upon
its essence and not upon its object. Nevertheless, it is hard
to conceive a love which is, so to speak, at work, and yet
applies to nothing. As a matter of fact, the mystics unani-
mously bear witness that God needs us, just as we need God.
Why should He need us unless it be to love us? And it is
to this very conclusion that the philosopher who holds to the
mystical experience must come. Creation will appear to him
as God undertaking to create creators, that he may have,
besides himself, beings worthy of his love.

in CREATION AND LOVE 219

We should hesitate to admit this if it were merely a ques-
tion of humdrum dwellers on this corner of the universe called
Earth. But, as we have said before, it is probable that life
animates all the planets revolving round all the stars. It
doubtless takes, by reason of the diversity of conditions in
which it exists, the most varied forms, some very remote
from what we imagine them to be; but its essence is every-
where the same, a slow accumulation of potential energy to
be spent suddenly in free action. We might still hesitate to
admit this, if we regarded as accidental the appearance amid
the plants and animals that people the earth of a living
creature such as man, capable of loving and making himself
loved. But we have shown that this appearance, while not
predetermined, was not accidental either. Though there were
other lines of evolution running beside the line which led to
man, and in spite of all that is incomplete in man himself,
we can say, while keeping in close touch with experience,
that it is man who accounts for the presence of life on our
planet. Finally, we might well go on hesitating if we believed
that the universe is essentially raw matter, and that life has
been super-added to matter. We have shown, on the contrary,
that matter and life, as we define them, are coexistent and
interdependent. This being the case, there is nothing to pre-
vent the philosopher from following to its logical conclusion
the idea which mysticism suggests to him of a universe
which is the mere visible and tangible aspect of love, and of
the need of love, together with all the consequences entailed
by this creative emotion: I mean the appearance of living
creatures in which this emotion finds its complement; of an
infinity of other beings without which they could not have
appeared, and lastly of the unfathomable depths of material
substance without which life would not have been possible.
No doubt we are here going beyond the conclusions we
reached in Creative Evolution. We wanted then to keep as
close as possible to facts. We stated nothing that could not
in time be confirmed by the tests of biology. Pending that
confirmation, we had obtained results which the philosophic
method, as we understand it, justified us in holding to be true.

220 DYNAMIC RELIGION CH.

Here we are in the field of probabilities alone. But we cannot
reiterate too often that philosophic certainty admits of degrees,
that it calls for intuition as well as for reason, and that if
intuition, backed up by science, is to be extended, such exten-
sion can only be mystical intuition. In fact, the conclusions
we have just set out complete naturally, though not neces-
sarily, those of our former work. Granted the existence of a
creative energy which is love, and which desires to produce
from itself beings worthy to be loved, it might indeed sow
space with worlds whose materiality, as the opposite of divine
spirituality , would simply express the distinction between being
created and creating, between the multifarious notes, strung
like pearls, of a symphony and the indivisible emotion from
which they sprang. In each of these worlds vital impetus and
raw matter might thus be complementary aspects of creation,
life, owing to the matter it traverses, its subdivision into dis-
tinct beings, and the potentialities it bears within it, inter-
penetrating as much as the spatiality of the matter which
displays them permits. This interpenetration has not been
possible on our planet; everything conduces to the idea that
whatever matter could be secured here for the embodiment
of life was ill-adapted to favour its impetus. The original
impulsion therefore split into divergent lines of evolutionary
progress, instead of remaining undivided to the end. Even
along the line on which the essential of the impulsion travelled
it ended by exhausting its effect, or rather the movement
which started as straight ended as circular. In that circle
humanity, the terminal point, revolves. Such was our ton-
elusion. In order to carry it further otherwise than by mere
guess-work, we should simply have to follow the lead of the
mystic. That current of life which traverses matter, and which
accounts for its existence, we simply took for granted. As for
humanity, which stands at the extremity of the main line, we
did not ask whether it had any other purpose but itself. Now,
this twofold question is contained in the very answer given
to it by mystical intuition. Beings have been called into
existence who were destined to love and be loved, since
creative energy is to be defined as love. Distinct from God,

in MAN AND THE UNIVERSE 221

Who is this energy itself, they could only spring into being
in a universe, and therefore the universe sprang into being.
In that portion of the universe which is our planet probably
in our whole planetary system such beings, in order to
appear, have had to be wrought into a species, and this species
involved a multitude of other species, which led up to it, or
sustained it, or else formed a residue. It may be that in other
systems there are only individuals radically differentiated
assuming them to be multifarious and mortal and may be
these creatures too were shaped at a single stroke, so as to be
complete from the first. On Earth, in any case, the species
which accounts for the existence of all the others is only
partially itself. It would never for an instant have thought of
becoming completely itself, if certain representatives of it had
not succeeded, by an individual effort added to the general
work of life, in breaking through the resistance put up by the
instrument, in triumphing over materiality in a word in
getting back to God. These men are the mystics. They have
blazed a trail along which other men may pass. They have,
by this very act, shown to the philosopher the whence and
whither of life.

People are never tired of saying that man is but a minute
speck on the face of the earth, the earth a speck in the
universe. Yet, even physically, man is far from merely occupy-
ing the tiny space allotted to him, and with which Pascal
himself was content when he condemned the "thinking reed"
to be, materially, a reed and nothing more. For if our body is
matter for our consciousness, it is co-extensive with our con-
sciousness, it comprises everything we perceive, it reaches as
far as the stars. But this vast body is changing continually,
sometimes radically, at the slightest, shifting of one part of
itself which is at its centre and occupies a small fraction of
space. This inner and central body, relatively invariable, is
ever present. It is not merely present, it is operative: it is
through this body, and through it alone, that we can move
other parts of the large body. And, since action is what
matters, since it is an understood thing that we are present
where we act, the habit has grown of limiting consciousness

222 DYNAMIC RELIGION CH.

to the small body and ignoring the vast one. The habit
appears, moreover, to be justified by science, which holds out-
ward perception to be the "epiphenomenon" of corresponding
intra-cerebral processes: so that all we perceive of the larger
body is regarded as being a mere phantom externalized by
the smaller one. We have previously exposed the illusion
contained in this metaphysical theory. 1 If the surface of our
organized small body (organized precisely with a view to im-
mediate action) is the seat of all our actual movements, our
huge inorganic body is the seat of our potential or theoretic-
ally possible actions: the perceptive centres of the brain being
the pioneers that prepare the way for subsequent actions and
plan them from within, everything happens as though our
external perceptions were built up by our brain and launched
by it into space. But the truth is quite different, and we^are
really present in everything we perceive, although through
ever varying parts of ourselves which are the abode of no more
than potential actions. Let us take matters from this angle and
we shall cease to say, even of our body, that it is lost in the
immensity of the universe.

It is true that, when people speak of the littleness of man
and the immensity of the universe, they are thinking of the
complexity of the latter quite as much as of its size. A person
appears as something simple; the material world is of a com-
plexity that defies imagination: even the tiniest visible par-
ticle of matter is a world in itself. How then can we believe
that the latter exists only for the sake of the former? Yet we
can and must. For, when we find ourselves confronted with
parts which we can go on counting without ever coming to
an end, it may be that the whole is simple, and that we
are looking at it from the wrong point of view. Move your
hand from one point to another: to you who perceive it from
the inside this is an indivisible movement. But I who per-
ceive it from the outside, with my attention centred on the
line followed, / say to myself that your hand has had to cover
the first part of the interval, then the half of the second half,
then the half of what was left, and so on: I could go on for
1 Mati&re et M&moire (Paris 1896). See the whole of chap. i.

in SUFFERING 223

millions of centuries, and never finish the enumeration of the
acts into which, in my eyes, the movement you feel to be
indivisible is split up. Thus the gesture which calls into being
the human species, or, to use more general terms, the objects
of love for the Creator, might quite well require conditions
which require other conditions, and so on, endlessly, the
implication of implications continuing to infinity. We cannot
think of this multiplicity without bewilderment; yet it is but
the reverse side of something indivisible. It is true that the
infinite numbers into which we decompose a gesture of the
hand are purely virtual, necessarily determined in their
virtualness by the reality of the gesture, whereas the com-
ponent parts of the universe, and the parts of these parts, are
realities: when they are living beings, they possess a spon-
taneity which may even attain to free activity. Hence we are
not affirming that the relation between the complex and the
simple is the same in both cases. We only wanted to show by
the comparison that complexity, even when unlimited, is no
proof of importance, and that an existence that is simple may
postulate a chain of conditions which never ends.

We come then to this conclusion. Attributing the place we
do to man, and the significance we do to life, it may well
appear optimistic. The vision at once rises before us of all the
suffering with which life is fraught, from the lowest stage of
consciousness up to man. It would be no use for us to contend
that among animals this suffering is by no means as great as
people think; without going so far as the Cartesian theory
of animal-machine, we may presume that pain is much
diminished for beings possessing no active memory, who do
not protract their past into their present, and who are not
complete personalities; their consciousness is of a somnambu-
listic nature; neither their pleasure nor their pain produce
the same deep and enduring reverberations as ours: do we
count as real the pain we feel in a dream? Even in man, is not
physical distress often due to imprudence or carelessness, or
to over-refined tastes, or artificial needs? As^for moral dis-
t^ess, it is as often_a$ not .pur own fault, and in any^caseTT

would not t>e so acute if we had not exasperated bur sensibility

*._.-. * *

224 DYNAMIC RELIGION CH.

^ pain is indefinitely

protracted and multiplied by brooding over it. In a word, it
would be easy to add a few paragraphs to the Theodicee of
Leibniz. But we have not the slightest inclination to do so.
The philosopher may indulge in speculations of this kind in
the solitude of his study; but what is he going to think about
it in the presence of a mother who has just watched the
passing of her child? No, suffering is a terrible reality, and it
is mere unwarrantable optimism to define evil a priori, even
reduced to what it actually is, as a lesser good. But there is
an empirical optimism, which consists simply in noting two
facts: first that humanity finds life, on the whole, good, since
it clings to it; and then, that there is an unmixed joy, lying
beyond pleasure and pain, which is the final state of the
mystic soul. In this twofold sense, and from both points of
view, optimism must be admitted, without any necessity for
the philosopher to plead the cause of God. It will be said, of
course, that if life is good on the whole, yet it would have
been better without suffering, and that suffering cannot have
been willed by a God of love. But there is nothing to prove
that suffering was willed. We have pointed out that what,
looked at from one side, appears as an infinite multiplicity of
things, of which suffering is indeed one, may look from
another side like an indivisible act, so that the elimination of
one part would mean doing away with the whole. Now it will
be suggested that the whole might have been different, and
such that pain had no place in it; therefore that life, even if
it is good, could have been better. And the conclusion will be
drawn that, if a principle really exists, and if that principle is
love, it is not omnipotent and it is therefore not God. But
that is just the question. What exactly does "omnipotence"
mean? We have shown that the idea of "nothing" is tanta-
mount to the idea of a square circle, that it vanished under
analysis, only leaving an empty word behind it, in fine that
it is a pseudo-idea. May not the same apply to the idea of
"everything", if this name is given not only to the sum-total
of the real, but also to the totality of the possible? I can, at a
stretch, represent something in my mind when I hear of the

in SURVIVAL 225

sum total of existing things, but in the sum-total of the non-
existent I can see nothing but a string of words. So that here
again the objection is based on a pseudo-idea, a verbal entity.
But we can go further still: the objection arises from a whole
series of arguments implying a radical defect of method. A
certain representation is built up a priori, and it is taken for
granted that this is the idea of God; from thence are deduced
the characteristics that the world ought to show; and if the
world does not actually show them, we are told that God does
not exist. Now, who can fail to see that, if philosophy is the
work of experience and reasoning, it must follow just the
reverse method, question experience as to what it has to
teach us of a Being Who transcends tangible reality as He
transcends human consciousness, and so appreciate the nature
of God by reasoning on the facts supplied by experience?
The nature of God will thus appear in the very reasons we
have for believing in His existence: we shall no longer try
to deduce His existence or non-existence from an arbitrary
conception of his nature. Let agreement be reached on this
point, and there will be no objection to talking about divine
omnipotence. We find such expressions used by these very
mystics to whom we turn for experience of the divine. They
obviously mean by this an energy to which no limit can be
assigned, and a power of creating and loving which surpasses
all imagination. They certainly do not evoke a closed con-
cept, still less a definition of God such as might enable us to
conclude what the world is like or what it should be like.

The same method applies to all problems of the after-life.
It is possible, with Plato, to lay down a priori a definition of
the soul as a thing incapable of decomposition because it is
simple, incorruptible because it is indivisible, immortal by
virtue of its essence. This leads, by a process of deduction,
to the idea of souls falling into Time, and thence to that of a
return into Eternity. But what is to be the answer to those
who deny the existence of the soul thus defined? And how
could the problems touching a real soul, its real origin, its
real fate, be resolved in accordance with reality, or even
posited in terms of reality, when the whole thing has been

226 DYNAMIC RELIGION CH.

mere speculation upon a possibly baseless conception of
the soul, or, at best, upon a conventional definition of the
meaning of the word which society has inscribed on a slice
of reality set apart for the convenience of conversation? The
affirmation remains as sterile as the definition was arbitrary.
The Platonic conception has not helped our knowledge of the
soul by a single step, for all that it has been meditated upon
for two thousand years. It was as complete and final as that
of the triangle, and for the same reasons. How can we help
seeing, however, that, if there really is a problem of the soul,
in terms of experience it must be posited, and in terms of
experience it must be progressively, and always partially,
solved? We shall not revert to this subject, which we have
dealt with elsewhere. Let us merely recall that the observa-
tion, by our senses and our consciousness, of normal facts
and morbid states reveals to us the inadequacy of the physio-
logical explanation of the memory, the impossibility of
attributing the preservation of recollections to the brain, and,
on the other hand, the possibility of following up, step by
step, the successive expansions of memory, from the point
where it contracts to allow the passage only of what is strictly
necessary to the present action, up to the farthest plane
where it spreads out a panorama of the whole indestructible
past. We said metaphorically that we were proceeding thus
from the summit to the base of the cone. It is only at its top-
most point that the cone fits into matter; as soon as we leave
the apex, we enter into a new realm. What is it? Let us call it
the spirit, or again, if you will, let us refer to the soul, but in
that case bear in mind that we are remoulding language and
getting the word to encompass a series of experiences instead
of an arbitrary definition. This experimental searching will
suggest the possibility and even probability of the survival
of the soul, since even here below we shall have observed
something of its independence of the body, indeed we shall
have almost felt it. This will be only one aspect of that
independence; we still remain imperfectly informed of the
conditions of the after-life, and especially regarding its dura-
tion: is it for a time, or for all eternity? But we shall at least

in SURVIVAL 227

have found something upon which experience can get a grip,
and one indisputable affirmation will be made possible, as
well as a future advance of our knowledge. So much for what
we might call the experience on the lower plane. Let us now
betake ourselves to the higher plane: we shall find an experience
of another type, mystic intuition. And this is presumably a
participation in the divine essence. Now, do these two experi-
ences meet? Can the after-life, which is apparently assured
to our soul by the simple fact that, even here below, a great
part of this activity is independent of the body, be identical
with that of the life into which, even here below, certain
privileged souls insert themselves? Only a persistent and
more profound investigation of these two experiences will tell
us; the problem must remain open. Still it is something to
have obtained, on essential points, a probability which is
capable of being transformed into a certainty, and for the
rest, for the knowledge of the soul and of its destiny, the
possibility of endless progress. It is true that at first this way
out of the difficulty will satisfy neither of the two schools
which do battle over the a priori definition of the soul,
categorically asserting or denying. Those who deny, because
they refuse to set up as a reality what is perhaps a baseless
construction of the mind, will stick to their negation in the
very teeth of the experience put before them, believing
that they are still dealing with the same thing. Those who
affirm will have nothing but contempt for ideas which are
admittedly provisional and calling for improvement; they will
see in them nothing more than their own thesis, impaired and
impoverished. It will take them some time to understand that
their thesis had been extracted just as it stands from current
language. Society doubtless follows certain suggestions of
inner experience when it talks of the soul; but it has made up
this word, like all the others, for its own convenience. It has
applied it to something distinct from the body. The more
radical the distinction, the better the word answers its pur-
pose: now it cannot be more radical than when the qualities
of the soul are taken to be purely and simply the negations of
those of matter. Such is the idea that the philosopher has

228 DYNAMIC RELIGION CH. in

received only too often, ready made, from society through
language. It appears to represent the acme of spirituality, just
because it goes to the very end of something. But this some-
thing is only negation. There is nothing to be extracted from
nothingness, and knowledge of such a soul is, of course, in-
capable of extension, nay, it rings hollow at the first blow of
an opposing philosophy. How much better to turn back to
the vague suggestions of consciousness from which we started,
to delve into them and follow them up till we reach a clear
intuition! Such is the method we recommend. Once again, it
will not please either side. To apply it is to risk getting caught
between the bark and the tree. But no matter! The bark will
split, if the wood of the old tree swells with a new flow of sap.

CHAPTER IV

FINAL REMARKS
MECHANICS AND MYSTICISM

ONE of the results of our analysis has been to draw a sharp
distinction, in the sphere of society, between the closed and
the open. The closed society is that whose members hold
together, caring nothing for the rest of humanity, on the
alert for attack or defence, bound, in fact, to a perpetual
readiness for battle. Such is human society fresh from the
hands of nature. Man was made for this society, as the ant
was made for the ant-heap. We must not overdo the analogy;
we should note, however, that the hymenopterous com-
munities are at the end of one of the two principal lines of
animal evolution, just as human societies are at the end of the
other, and that they are in this sense counterparts of one
another. True, the first are stereotyped, whereas the others
vary; the former obey instinct, the latter intelligence. But if
nature, and for the very reason that she has made us intelligent,
has left us to some extent with freedom of choice in our type
of social organization, ^he has at all events ordained that we
should live in society./A force of unvarying direction, which
is to the soul what force of gravity is to the body, ensures the
cohesion of the group by bending all individual wills to the
same end.\That force is moral obligation. We have shown that
it may extend its scope in societies that are becoming open,
but that it was made for the closed society. And we have
shown also how a closed society can only live, resist this or
that dissolving action of intelligence, preserve and communi-
cate to each of its members that confidence which is in-
dispensable, through a religion born of the myth-making
function. \This religion, which we have called static, and this

229

2 3 o MECHANICS AND MYSTICISM CH.

obligation, which is tantamount to a pressure, are the very
substance of closed society!'*

Never shall we pass from the closed society to the open
society, from the city to humanity, by any mere broadening
out. The two things are not of the same essence.! The open
society is the society which is deemed in principle to embrace
all humanity. A dream dreamt, now and again, by chosen
souls, it embodies on every occasion something of itself in
creations, each of which, through a more or less far-reaching
transformation of man, conquers difficulties hitherto un-
conquerable. But after each occasion the circle that has
momentarily opened closes again. Part of the new has flowed
into the mould of the old; individual aspiration has become
social pressure; and obligation covers the whole. Do these
advances always take place in the same direction? We can take
it for granted that the direction is the same, the moment we
agree that they are advances. For each one is thus defined as a
step forward. But this can be no more than a metaphor, and
if there were really a pre-existent direction along which man
had simply to advance, moral renovation would be foresee-
able; there would be no need, on each occasion, for a creative
effort. The truth is that it is always possible to take the latest
phase of renovation, to define it and to say that the others
contained a greater or lesser quantity of what the definition
defines, that therefore they all led up to that renovation. But
things only assume this form in retrospect; the changes were
qualitative and not quantitative; they defied all anticipation.
In one respect, however, they had, in themselves, and not
merely through the medium of a conceptual interpretation,
something in common. All aimed at opening what was closed;
and tJie-gK>up, which after the last opening had closed on
itself, was brought back every time to humanity. Let us go
further: these successive efforts were not, strictly speaking,
the progressive realization of an ideal, since no idea, forged
beforehand, could possibly represent a series of accretions,
each of which, creating itself, created its own idea; and yet
the diversity of these efforts could be summed up into one
and the same thing: an impetus, which had ended in closed

iv CLOSED SOCIETY AND OPEN SOCIETY 231

societies because it could carry matter no further along,
but which later on is destined to be sought out and captured,
in default of the species, by some privileged individual. This
impetus is thus carried forward through the medium of
certain men, each of whom thereby constitutes a species
composed of a suigle individual. If the individual is fully
conscious of this, \ if the fringe of intuition surrounding his
intelligence is capabfe~of expanding sufficiently to envelop its
object, that is the mystic life.XFhe dynamic religion which thus
Springs into being is the Very opposite of the static religion
born of the myth-making function, in the same way as the
open society is the opposite of the closed society. But just as
the new moral aspiration only takes shape by borrowing from
the closed society its natural form, which is obligation, so
dynamic religion is only propagated through images and
symbols supplied by the myth-making function. There is no
need to go back over these different points. I wanted simply
to emphasize the distinction I have made between the open
and the closed society.

We only have to concentrate on this distinction, and we
shall see some of the big problems vanish, others assume a
new shape. Whether we champion or impeach a religion, do
we always take into account what is specifically religious in
religion? We cherish or we dismiss a story which may have
been found necessary for inducing and propagating a certain
feeling, but religion is essentially that very feeling. We discuss
the definitions it lays down and the theories it sets forth;
and it has, indeed, made use of a metaphysic to give itseli
bodily substance; but it might, at a stretch, have assumed a
different corporeal form, or even none at all. The mistake is
to believe that it is possible to pass, by a mere process of
enlargement or improvement, from the static to the dynamic,
from demonstration or fabulation, even though it bear the
stamp of truth, to intuition. The thing itself is thus mistaken
for its expression or its symbol. This is tbj&-Hua^errorj)f^a
cVi^r intdl^ctualism. We find it, just the same, when we pass
from religion to morality. There is a static morality, which
exists, as a fact, at a given moment in society; it has become

232 MECHANICS AND MYSTICISM CH.

ingrained in the customs, the ideas, the institutions; its
obligatory character is to be traced to nature's demand for
a life in common. There is, on the other hand, a dynamic
morality which is impetus, and which is related to life in
general, creative of nature which created the social demand.
The first obligation, in so far as it is a pressure, is infra-
rational. The second, in so far as it is aspiration, is supra-
rational. But intelligence intervenes. It seeks out the motive,
that is to say the intellectual content, of each of these pre-
scriptions; and, since intelligence is systematic, it imagines
that the problem consists in reducing all moral motives to
one. Now, if so, it can choose any one of them that it pleases.
General interest, personal interest, self-love, sympathy, pity,
logical consistency, etc., there is no principle of action from
which it is not possible to deduce more or less the morality
that is generally accepted. It is true that the easiness of the
operation, and the purely approximate character of the result,
should put us on our guard. If almost identical rules of con-
duct are indifferently deducible from such divers principles,
this is probably because no one of the principles was reduced
to its specific characteristics. The philosopher went in search
of his quarry in the social environment, where everything
interpenetrates everything, where egoism and vanity are
impregnated with sociability; it is in no way surprising, then,
that he should find again in each principle the morality that
he has put or left there. But morality itself he leaves un-
explained, since he would have first had to delve into social
life, in so far as it is a discipline demanded by nature, and
then again to delve into nature herself itaken as the creation
of life in general. He would thus have reached the very root
of morality, which eludes the search of a purely intellectualist
philosophy; the latter can only proffer advice, adduce reasons,
which we are perfectly free to combat with other reasons.
As a matter of fact, such philosophy always implies that the
motive it has taken up as a principle is " preferable" to the
others, that there is a difference of value between motives,
and that there exists a general ideal by reference to which
the real is to be estimated. It thus provides itself with a refuge

iv CLOSED SOCIETY AND OPEN SOCIETY 233

in the Platonic theory, with the Idea of Good dominating all
others: the reasons for action can then apparently claim to be
ranged in order of merit beneath the Idea of Good, the best
being those that come nearest to it, and the attraction of
Good being the principle of obligation. But then the great
difficulty is to say by what token we are to recognize that
this or that line of conduct is nearer or further from the ideal
Good; if this were known, it would be the essential, and
the Idea of Good would become unnecessary. It would be
equally hard to explain how the ideal in question creates an
imperative obligation, especially the strictest obligation of all,
the obligation which attaches to custom in primitive and
essentially closed societies. The truth is that an ideal cannot
become obligatory unless it is already active, in which case
it is not the idea contained in it, but its action, which makes j
it obligatory. Or rather it is only the name we give to the
supposedly ultimate effect of that action, felt to be continu-
ous, the hypothetical terminal point of the movement which
is already sweeping us forward.J At the root of all theories,
then, we find the two illusions we have time and again
denounced. The first, a very general one, consists in the
conception of movement as a gradual diminution of the
space between the position of the moving object, which is
immobility, and its terminal point considered as reached,
which is immobility also, whereas positions are but mental
snapshots of the indivisible movement: hence the impossi-
bility of re-establishing the true mobility, that is to say, in
this case, the aspirations and pressures directly or indirectly
constituting obligation. The second illusion concerns more
specially the evolution of life. Because an evolutionary pro-
cess has been observed starting from a certain point, it is
believed that this point must have been reached by the same
evolutionary process, whereas the evolution may have been
quite different, whereas even there may have been previously
no evolution at all. Because we note a gradual enrichment
of morality, we are apt to think that there is no such thing
as a primitive irreducible morality, contemporary with the
appearance of man. ^Yet we must posit this original morality
1 Q

234 MECHANICS AND MYSTICISM CH.

at the same time as the human species, and assume that there
was at the beginning a closed society.

Now, is the distinction between the closed and the open,
which is necessary to resolve or remove theoretical problems,
able to help us practically ?\It would be of little utility, if the
closed society had always 'been so constituted as to shut
itself up again after each momentary opening. In that case,
however untiringly we might delve back into the past, we
should never reach the primitive; the natural would be a
mere consolidation of the acquired. But, as we have just said,
the truth is quite different. There is such a thing as funda-
mental nature, and there are acquisitions which, as they
become superaflded to nature, imitate it without becoming
merged into iti Working back step by step we should get
back to an original closed society, the general plan of which
fitted the pattern of our species as the ant-heap fits the ant,
but with this difference that in the second case it is the actual
detail of the social organization which is given in advance,
whereas in the other there exists only the main outline, a
few directions, just enough natural prefiguration to provide
immediately for the individual a suitable social environment.
A knowledge of this plan would doubtless be to-day of mere
historical interest, if the several characteristics had been
ousted by others. But nature is indestructible. The French
poet was wrong when he said: "Expel nature, she comes back
at the double". There is no expelling her, she is there all the
time. We have dwelt on the question of the transmissibility
of acquired characteristics. It is highly improbable that a
habit is ever transmitted; if this does occur, it is owing to
a combination of many favourable conditions so accidental
that it will certainly not recur often enough to implant the
habit in the species. It is in customs, institutions, even in
language, that moral acquisitions are deposited; they are then
transmitted by unceasing education; it is in this way that
habits which pass on from generation to generation end by
being considered as hereditary. But everything conspires to
encourage the wrong explanation: misdirected pride, super-
ficial optimism, a mistaken idea of the real nature of progress,

iv PERSISTENCE OF THE NATURAL 235

lastly and above all, a very widespread confusion between the
inborn tendency, which is indeed transmissible from parent
to child, and the acquired habit that has frequently become
grafted on to the natural tendency. There is no doubt but
that this belief has influenced positive science itself, which
accepted it from common sense, in spite of the small number
and the questionable character of the facts called upon to
support it, and then handed it back to common sense after
having reinforced it with its own undisputed authority.
There is nothing more instructive on this point than the
biological and psychological work of Herbert Spencer. It is
based almost entirely on the idea of the hereditary trans-
mission of acquired characteristics. And, in the days of its
popularity, it impregnated the evolution doctrines of scien-
tists. Now, this idea was, in Spencer, nothing more than the
generalization of a thesis, presented in his first works, on
social progress: his interest had at first been exclusively
centred on the study of societies; it was only later that he
came to deal with the phenomena of life. So that a sociology
which thinks it is borrowing from biology the idea of heredi-
tary transmission of the acquired is only taking back what it
lent. This unproven philosophical theory has assumed a
borrowed air of scientific assurance on its way through
science, but it remains mere philosophy, and is further than
ever from being proved. So let us keep to ascertained facts
and to the probabilities suggested by them: in our opinion,
if you eliminated from the man of to-day what has been
deposited in him by unceasing education, he would be found
to be identical, or nearly so, with his remotest ancestors. 1
What conclusion are we to deduce from this? Since the

1 We say "nearly" because we must take into account the variations
which the living creature plays, as it were, on the theme supplied by his
progenitors. But these variations, being accidental, and taking place in
any direction, cannot be added together, in the lapse of time, to modify
the species. On the thesis of the transmissibility of acquired character-
istics, and on the evolutionism which certain biologists would found upon
it, see Creative Evolution (chap. i.).

Let us add that, as we have already remarked, the sudden leap forward
which ended in the human species may have been attempted at more than

236 MECHANICS AND MYSTICISM CH.

dispositions of the species subsist, immutable, deep within
all of us, it is impossible that the moralist and the sociologist
should not be required to take them into account. True, it
has only been given.to a chosen few to dig down, first beneath
the strata of the acquired, then beneath nature, and so get
back into the very impetus of life. If such an effort could be
generalized, the impetus would not have stopped short at
the human species, nor consequently at the closed society, as
if before a blank wall. It is none the less true that these
privileged ones would fain draw humanity after them; since
they cannot communicate to the world at large the deepest
elements of their spiritual condition, they transpose it super-
ficially; they seek a translation of the dynamic into the static
such as society may accept and stabilize by education. Now
they can only succeed in the measure in which they have taken
nature into consideration. Humanity as a whole cannot bend
nature to its will. But it can get round it. And this is possible
only if its general configuration is known. The task would be
a difficult one, if it obliged us to undertake the study of
psychology in general. But we are dealing here with only one
particular point, human nature in so far as it is predisposed
to a certain social form. We suggest that there is a natural
human society, vaguely prefigured in us, that nature has
taken care to supply us with a diagram of it beforehand, while
leaving our intelligence and our will entirely free to work in
that direction. The diagram, vague and incomplete, corre-
sponds, in the realm of reasonable and free activity, to what
is, in the case of instinct, the clear-cut design of the ant-hill
or the hive at the other terminal point of evolution. So that
all we have to do is to get back to the simple original sketch.
But how is it to be found, with the acquired overlaying the
natural? We should be at a loss to give the answer if we had to
supply an automatically applicable method of research. The
truth is that we have to grope our way tentatively, by a
system of cross-checking, following simultaneously several

one point in space and time and only partially succeeded, thus giving rise
to "men" to whom we may, if we like, give that name, but who are not
necessarily our ancestors.

iv CHARACTERISTICS OF NATURAL SOCIETY 237

methods, each of which will lead only to possibilities or prob-
abilities: by their mutual interplay the results will neutralize
or reinforce one another, leading to reciprocal verification and
correction. Thus, we shall take "primitive peoples" into
account, without forgetting that here also a layer of acquisi-
tions covers nature, though it may be thinner than in our
own case. We shall observe children, but not forget that
nature has made provision for differences of age, and that
child nature is not necessarily human nature; above all, the
child is imitative, and what appears to us as spontaneous is
often the effect of an education we have unwittingly been
giving him. But the main and essential source of information
is bound to be introspection. We must search for the bed-
rock of sociability, and also of unsociability, which would be
perceptible to our consciousness, if established society had
not imbued us with habits and dispositions which adjust us
to it. Of these strata we are no longer aware, save at rare
intervals, and then in a flash. We must recapture that
moment of vision and abide by it.

Let us begin by saying that man was designed for very small
societies. And it is generally admitted that primitive com-
munities were small. But we must add that the original state
of mind survives, hidden away beneath the habits, without
which indeed there would be no civilization. Driven inwards,
powerless, it yet lives on in the depths of consciousness. If it
does not go so far as to determine acts, yet it manifests itself
in words. In a great nation certain districts may be admini-
stered to the general satisfaction; but where is the govern-
ment that the governed go so far as to call a good one? They
think they have praised it quite enough when they say it is
not so bad as the others and, in this sense only, the best. Here
the disapproval is congenital. In fact, the art of governing a
great people is the only one for which there exists no technical
training, no effective education, especially when we come to
the highest posts. The extreme scarcity of political leaders of
any calibre is owing to the fact that they are called upon to
decide at any moment, and in detail, problems which the

238 MECHANICS AND MYSTICISM CH.

increased size of societies may well have rendered insoluble.
Study the history of the great modern nations: you will find
plenty of great scientists, great artists, great soldiers, great
specialists in every line but how many great statesmen?

Yet nature, which ordained small societies, left them an
opening for expansion. For she also ordained war, or at least
she made the conditions of man's life such that war was
inevitable. Now, the menace of war can determine several
small societies to unite against a common danger. It is true
that these unions are rarely lasting. In any case they lead to
an assemblage of societies which is of the same order of
magnitude as each single unit. It is rather in another sense
that war is the origin of empires. These are born of conquest.
Even if the war at the outset was not one of conquest,
that is what it becomes ultimately, because the victor
will have found it so convenient to appropriate the lands
of the vanquished, and even their populations, and thus
profit by their labour. In this way the great Eastern
empires of bygone days were formed. They fell into
decay under various influences, but in reality because they
were too unwieldy to live. When the victor grants to the
conquered populations a semblance of independence, the
grouping lasts longer: witness the Roman Empire. But that
the primitive instinct persists, that it exercises a disintegrating
effect, there is no doubt. Leave it to operate, and the political
construction crumbles. It was thus that the feudal system
came into being in different countries, as the result of differ-
ent events, under different conditions; the only common
factor was the suppression of the force which was preventing
the breaking-up of society; the break-up then took place
spontaneously. If great nations have been able to build them-
selves up firmly in modern times, this is because constraint,
a cohesive force working from without and from above on the
whole complex, has little by little given way to a principle of
unity arising from the very heart of each of the elementary
societies grouped together, that is to say, from the very seat
of the disruptive forces to which an uninterrupted resistance
has to be opposed. This principle, the only one that can

iv CHARACTERISTICS OF NATURAL SOCIETY 239

possibly neutralize the tendency to disruption, is patriotism.
The ancients were well acquainted with it; they adored their
country, and it is one of their poets who said that it is sweet
to die for her. But it is a far cry from that attachment to the
city, a group still devoted to a god who stands by it in battle,
to the patriotism which is as much a pacific as a warlike virtue,
which may be tinged with mysticism, which mingles no
calculations with its religion, which overspreads a great
country and rouses a nation, which draws to itself the best
in all souls, which is slowly and reverently evolved out of
memories and hopes, out of poetry and love, with a faint
perfume of every moral beauty under heaven, like the honey
distilled from flowers. It took as noble a sentiment as this,
imitating the mystic state, to overcome so deep-seated a
sentiment as the selfishness of the tribe.

Now what is the regime of a society fresh from the hands
of nature? It is possible that humanity did in fact begin as
scattered and isolated family groups. But these were mere
embryonic societies, and the philosopher should no more seek
in them the essential tendencies of social life than the
naturalist should study the habits of a species by confining
his attention to the embryo. We must take society when it is
complete, that is to say, capable of defending itself, and con-
sequently, however small, organized for war. What then, in
this precise sense, will its natural government be? If it were
not desecrating the Greek words to apply them to a state of
savagery, we should say that it is monarchic or oligarchic,
probably both. These two systems are indistinguishable in the
rudimentary state: there must be a chief, and there is no
community without privileged individuals, who borrow from
or give to the chief something of his prestige, or rather who
draw it, as he does, from some supernatural power. Authority
is absolute on one side, obedience absolute on the other. We
have said time and again that human societies and hymen-
opterous societies stand at the extremities of the two principal
lines of biological evolution. Heaven forbid that we should
assimilate them to each other! Man is intelligent and free.
But we must always remember that social life was part of the

240 MECHANICS AND MYSTICISM CH.

structural plan of the human species just as in that of the bee,
that it was a necessary part, that nature could not rely
exclusively on our free will, that accordingly she had to see to
it that one or a few individuals should command and the rest
obey. In the insect world, the diversity of social function is
bound up with a difference of organization; you have " poly-
morphism". Shall we then say that in human societies we have
"dimorphism", no longer both physical and psychical as in
the insect, but psychical only? We think so, though it must
be understood that this dimorphism does not separate men
into two hard and fast categories, those that are born leaders
and those that are born subjects. Nietzsche's mistake was to
believe in a separation of this kind: on the one hand "slaves",
on the other "masters". The truth is that dimorphism gener-
ally makes of each of us both a leader with the instinct to
command and a subject ready to obey, although the second
tendency predominates to the extent of being the only one
apparent in most men. It is comparable to that of insects in
that it implies two organizations, two indivisible systems of
qualities (certain of which would be defects in the moralist's
eyes): we plump for the one system or the other, not in detail,
as would be the case if it were a matter of contracting habits,
but at a single stroke, kaleidoscope-fashion, as is bound to
happen in a natural dimorphism, exactly comparable to that
of the embryo with the choice between two sexes. We have a
clear vision of this in times of revolution. Unassuming citizens,
up to that moment humble and obedient, wake up one fine
day with pretensions to be leaders of men. The kaleidoscope
which had been held steady has now shifted one notch and
lo! a complete metamorphosis! The result is sometimes good:
great men of action have been revealed who were themselves
unaware of their real capacity. But it is generally unfortunate.
Within honest and gentle men there rushes up from the
depths a ferocious personality, that of the leader who is a
failure. And here we have a characteristic trait of that
"political animal", man.

We shall not go so far, indeed, as to say that one of the attri-
butes of the leader dormant within us is ferocity. But it is certain

iv CHARACTERISTICS OF NATURAL SOCIETY 241

that nature, at once destructive of individuals and productive
of species, must have willed the ruthless leader if she provided
for leaders at all. The whole of history bears witness to this.
Incredible wholesale slaughter, preceded by ghastly tortures,
has been ordered in absolute cold blood by men who have
themselves handed down the record of these things, graven
in stone. It may be argued that such things happened in very
remote times. But if the form has changed, if Christianity has
put an end to certain crimes, or at least obtained that they be
not made a thing to boast of, murder has all too often remained
the ratio ultima, if not prima, of politics. An abomination no
doubt, but imputable to nature as much as to man. For nature
has at her disposal neither imprisonment nor exile; she knows
only sentence of death. We may be allowed perhaps to recall
a memory. It so happened that we met certain distinguished
foreigners, coming from far-off lands, but dressed as we were,
speaking French as we did, moving about, affable and amiable,
among us. Shortly after we learned from a daily paper that,
once back in their country and affiliated to opposite parties,
one of them had had the other hanged, with all the para-
phernalia of justice, simply to get rid of an awkward opponent.
The tale was illustrated with a photograph of the gallows.
The accomplished man of the world was dangling, half-
naked, before the gaping crowd. Horrible, most horrible!
Civilized men all, but the original political instinct had blown
civilization to the winds and laid bare the nature underneath.
Men who would think themselves bound to make the punish-
meht fit the offence, if they had to deal with a guilty man, go
to the extreme of killing an innocent person at the call of
political expediency. Similarly do the worker bees stab the
drones to death when they consider that the hive needs them
no longer.

But let us leave aside the temperament of the "leader" and
consider the respective sentiments of ruler and ruled. These
sentiments will be clearer where the line of demarcation is
more distinct, in a society already considerable, but which
has grown without radically modifying the "natural society".
The governing class, in which we include the king if there is

242 MECHANICS AND MYSTICISM CH.

a king, may have been recruited in the course of history by
different methods; but it always believes itself to belong to a
superior race. There is nothing surprising in this. What might
surprise us more, if we were not familar with the dimorphism
of social man, is that the people themselves should be con-
vinced of this innate superiority. Doubtless the oligarchy is
careful to foster this sentiment. If it owes its origin to war, it
will have faith and compel others to have faith in its own
congenital military virtues, handed down from father to son.
And indeed it maintains a real superiority of strength, thanks
to the discipline it imposes on itself, and to the measures it
takes to prevent the inferior class from organizing itself in its
turn. Yet, in such a case, experience should show the ruled
that their rulers are men like themselves. But instinct resists.
It only begins to waver when the upper class itself invites it
to do so. Sometimes the upper class does this unwittingly,
through obvious incapacity, or by such crying abuses that it
undermines the faith placed in it. At other times the invitation
is intentional, certain members of the class turning against it,
often from personal ambition, sometimes from a sentiment of
justice: by stooping down towards the lower classes, they dispel
the illusion fostered by distance. It was in this way that some
of the nobles collaborated in the French Revolution of 1789,
which abolished the privilege of birth. Generally speaking,
the initiative of assaults against inequality justified or un-
justified has come rather from the upper classes, from those
that were better off, and not from the lower, as might have
been expected if it were a case of a mere clash between dass
interests. Thus it was the upper middle class, and not the
working classes, who played the leading part in the Revolu-
tions of 1830 and 1848, aimed (the second in particular)
against the privilege of wealth. Later it was men of the
educated classes who demanded education for all. The truth
is that, if an aristocracy believes naturally, religiously, in its
native superiority, the respect it inspires is no less religious,
no less natural.

It is easy, then, to understand that humanity should have
arrived at democracy as a later development (for they were

iv NATURAL SOCIETY AND DEMOCRACY 243

false democracies, those cities of antiquity, based on slavery,
relieved by this fundamental iniquity of the biggest and most
excruciating problems). Of all political systems, it is indeed
the furthest removed from nature, the only one to transcend,
at least in intention, the conditions of the " closed society ".
It confers on man inviolable rights. These rights, in order to
remain inviolate, demand of all men an incorruptible fidelity
to duty. It therefore takes for its matter an ideal man, respect-
ing others as he does himself, inserting himself into obliga-
tions which he holds to be absolute, coinciding so closely
with this absolute that it is no longer possible to say whether
it is the duty that confers the rights or the right which imposes
the duty. The citizen thus defined is both "law-maker and
subject", as Kant has it. The citizens as a whole, that is the
people, are therefore sovereign. Such is democracy in theory.
It proclaims liberty, demands equality, and reconciles these
two hostile sisters by reminding them that they are sisters, by
exalting above everything fraternity. Looked at from this
angle, the republican motto shows that the third term dispels
the oft-noted contradiction between the two others, and that
the essential thing is fraternity: a fact which would make it
possible to say that democracy is evangelical in essence and
that its motive power is love. Its sentimental origins could be
found in the soul of Rousseau, its philosophic principles in
the works of Kant, its religious basis in both Kant and
Rousseau: we know how much Kant owed to his pietism, and
Rousseau to an interplay of Protestantism and Catholicism.
The American Declaration of Independence (1776), which
served as a model for the Declaration of the Rights of Man
in 1791, has indeed a Puritan ring: "We hold these truths to
be self-evident . . . that all men are endowed by their Creator
with unalienable rights, etc." Objections occasioned by the
vagueness of the democratic formula arise from the fact that
the original religious character has been misunderstood. How
is it possible to ask for a precise definition of liberty and of
equality when the future must lie open to all sorts of pro-
gress, and especially to the creation of new conditions under
which it will be possible to have forms of liberty and equality

244 MECHANICS AND MYSTICISM CH.

which are impossible of realization, perhaps of conception,
to-day? One can do no more than trace the general outlines;
their content will improve as and when fraternity provides.
Ama, etfac quod vis l The formula of non-democratic society,
wishing its motto to tally, word for word, with that of demo-
cracy, would be "authority, hierarchy, immobility". There
you have then democracy in its essence. Of course it must be
considered only as an ideal, or rather a signpost indicating
the way in which humanity should progress. In the first
place, it was more than anything else as a protest that it was
introduced into the world. Every sentence of the Declaration
of the Rights of Man is a challenge to some abuse. The main
thing was to put an end to intolerable suffering. Summing
up the grievances set forth in the memoirs presented to the
Stats GenerauXy Emile Faguet has written somewhere that
the French Revolution was not made for the sake of liberty
and equality, but simply because "people were starving".
Supposing this to be true, we must explain why it was
at a given time that people refused to go on "starving".
It is none the less true that, if the French Revolution
formulated things as they should be, the object was to do
away with things as they were. Now, it sometimes happens
that the intention with which an idea is started remains
invisibly attached to it, like the direction to the arrow.
The democratic precepts, first enunciated with a definite
idea of protest, provide evidence of their origin. They are
found convenient to prevent, to reject, to overthrow; it is
not easy to gather from them the positive indication of what
is to be done. Above all, they are only applicable if trans-
posed, absolute and semi-evangelical as they primitively were,
into terms of purely relative morality or rather of general
utility; and the transposition always risks turning into an in-
curvation in the direction of private interest. But it is not
necessary to catalogue the objections raised against democracy
nor indeed the replies to those objections. We merely wanted
to show, in the democratic mood, a mighty effort in a direction
contrary to that of nature.
Now, we have pointed to certain features of natural society.

iv NATURAL SOCIETY AND WAR 245

Taken together, they compose a countenance whose expres-
sion can be easily interpreted. Self-centredness, cohesion,
hierarchy, absolute authority of the chief, all this means dis-
cipline, the war-spirit. Did nature will war? Let us repeat
once again that nature willed nothing at all, if we mean
by will a faculty of making particular decisions. But she can-
not posit an animal species without implicitly outlining the
attitudes and movement which arise from its structure and
extend that structure. It is in this sense that she willed war.
She endowed man with a tool-making intelligence. Instead of
supplying him with tools, as she did for a considerable number
of the animal species, she preferred that he should make
them himself. Now man is necessarily the owner of his tools,
at any rate while he is using them. But since they are things
apart from him, they can be taken away from him; it is easier
to acquire them ready-made than to make them. Above all,
they are meant for action in some specific avocation, to be
used for hunting or fishing, for example; the group of which
he is a member may have fixed its choice on a forest, a lake,
a river; another group may find it more convenient to settle
in that very same place than to look further afield. There is
now nothing for it but to fight the matter out. We have taken
the case of a hunting forest, or a lake for fishing; it may just
as well be a matter of fields to be cultivated, women to be
seized, slaves to be carried off. In the same way reasons will
be brought forward to justify such dealings. But no matter
the thing taken, the motive adduced: the origin of war is
ownership, individual or collective, and since humanity is
predestined to ownership by its structure, war is natural. So
strong, indeed, is the war instinct, that it is the first to appear
when we scratch below the surface of civilization in search of
nature. We all know how little boys love fighting. They get
their heads punched. But they have the satisfaction of having
punched the other fellow's head. It has been justly said that
childhood's games were the preparatory training to which
nature prompts them, with a view to the task laid on grown
men. But we can go further, and look on most of the wars
recorded in history as preparatory training or sport. When

246 MECHANICS AND MYSTICISM CH.

we consider the futility of the motives which brought about
a goodly number of them, we are reminded of the duellists in
Marion Delorme running each other through the body "for
no reason, for the fun of the thing", or else the Irishman
cited by Lord Bryce, who could not see two men exchanging
fisticuffs in the street without asking, "Is this a private affair,
or may anyone join in?" On the other hand, if we put side by
side with these casual scraps those decisive wars such as led
to the annihilation of a whole people, we realize that the
second account for the first: a war-instinct was inevitable,
and because it existed to meet the contingency of those savage
wars, which we might call natural, a number of incidental
wars have occurred, simply to prevent the sword from rust-
ing. Think now of the enthusiasm of a people at the outbreak
of a war! This is doubtless, to a certain extent, a defensive
reaction against fear, a spontaneous stimulation of courage.
But there is also the feeling that we were made for a life of
risk and adventure, as though peace were but a pause between
two wars. The enthusiasm quickly dies down, for the suffering
is considerable. If we leave out the last war, however, where the
horror was beyond anything we believed possible, it is strange
to see how soon the sufferings of war are forgotten in time of
peace. It is asserted that woman is provided with a special
psychical mechanism which causes her to forget the pains of
childbirth: a too complete recollection might prevent her
from having another child. Some mechanism of the same
order really seems to be operative in favour of the horrors
of war, especially among young nations. Nature has taken
yet further precautions in this direction. She has interposed
between foreigners and ourselves a cunningly woven veil of
ignorance, preconceptions and prejudices. That we should
know nothing about a country to which we have never been
is not surprising. But that, being ignorant of it, we should
criticize it, and nearly always unfavourably, is a fact which
calls for explanation. Anyone who has lived outside his own
country, and has later tried to initiate his countrymen into
what we call a foreign "mentality", has felt in them an instinct-
ive resistance. The resistance is not any stronger the more

iv NATURAL SOCIETY AND WAR 247

remote the country. Very much the contrary, it varies rather
in inverse ratio to the distance. It is those whom we have the
greatest chance of meeting whom we least want to know.
Nature could have found no surer way of making every
foreigner a virtual enemy, for if perfect mutual knowledge
does not necessarily conduce to a fellow-feeling, it at least
precludes hate. We had examples of this during the war.
A professor of German was just as patriotic as any other
Frenchman, just as ready to lay down his life, just as "worked
up" even against Germany; yet it was not the same thing.
One corner was set apart. Anyone who is thoroughly familiar
with the language and literature of a people cannot be wholly
its enemy. This should be borne in mind when we ask
education to pave the way for international understanding.
The mastery of a foreign tongue, by making possible the
impregnation of the mind by the corresponding literature and
civilization, may at one stroke do away with the prejudice
ordained by nature against foreigners in general. But this is
not the place to enumerate all the visible outward effects of
the latent prejudice. Let us only say that the two opposing
maxims, Homo homini deus and Homo homini lupus, are easily
reconcilable. When we formulate the first, we are thinking of
some fellow-countryman. The other applies to foreigners.

We have just said that besides incidental wars there are
essential wars, for which the war-instinct, apparently, was
made. Among these are the great conflicts of our own times.
The object is less and less conquest for conquest's sake.
Pe6ples no longer go to war for the sake of wounded pride,
prestige or glory. They fight to avoid starvation, so they say
in reality to maintain a certain standard of living, below which
they believe that life would not be worth while. Gone is the
idea of the delegating of the fighting to a limited number of
soldiers chosen to represent the nation. Gone anything resem-
bling a duel. All must fight against all, as did the hordes of
the early days. Only, the fighting is done with arms forged
by our civilization, and the slaughter surpasses in horror any-
thing the ancients could have even dreamed of. At the pace
at which science is moving, that day is not far off when one

248 MECHANICS AND MYSTICISM CH.

of the two adversaries, through some secret process which he
was holding in reserve, will have the means of annihilating his
opponent. The vanquished may vanish off the face of the
earth.

Are things bound to follow their natural course? Men
whom we unhesitatingly rank among the benefactors of
humanity have fortunately interposed. Like all great optim-
ists they began by assuming as solved the problem to be
solved. They founded the League of Nations. Now, the
results already obtained are more than we dared to hope. For
the difficulty of abolishing war is greater even than is gener-
ally realized by most people who have no faith in its abolition.
Pessimists though they are, they yet agree with the optimists
in considering the case of two peoples on the verge of war as
similar to that of two individuals with a quarrel; only, in their
opinion it will be materially impossible to compel the former,
like the latter, to bring this difference before the court and
accept its decision. Yet there is a radical distinction. Even
if the League of Nations had at its disposal a seemingly
adequate armed force (and even so the recalcitrant nation
would still have over the League the advantage of the initial
impetus; even so the unexpectedness of a scientific discovery
would render increasingly unforeseeable the nature of the
resistance the League of Nations would have to organize), it
would come up against the deep-rooted war-instinct under-
lying civilization; whereas individuals who leave to the judge
the business of settling a dispute are in some obscure way
encouraged to do so by the instinct of discipline immanent
in the closed society: a quarrel has momentarily upset their
normal position which was a complete insertion into society;
but they come back to this position, as the pendulum swings
back to the vertical. So that the difficulty is far greater. Is it
vain, however, to try and overcome it?

We think not. The object of the present work was to in-
vestigate the origins of morality and religion. We have been
led to certain conclusions. We might leave it at that. But
since at the basis of our conclusions was a radical distinction
between the closed and the open society, since the tendencies

iv WAR AND THE INDUSTRIAL AGE 249

of the closed society have, in our opinion, persisted, in-
eradicable, in the society that is on the way to becoming an
open one, since all these instincts of discipline originally con-
verged towards the war-instinct, we are bound to ask to what
extent the primitive instinct can be repressed or circum-
vented, and answer by a few supplementary considerations a
question which occurs to us quite naturally.

For, though the war-instinct does exist independently, it
none the less hinges on rational motives. History tells us that
these motives have been extremely varied. They become in-
creasingly few as war becomes more terrible. The last war,
together with those future ones which we can dimly foresee,
if we are indeed doomed to have more wars, is bound up with
the industrial character of our civilization. If we want to get
an outline, simplified and stylized, of modern conflicts, we
shall have to begin by picturing nations as purely agricultural
populations. They live on the produce of their soil. Suppose
they have just enough to feed themselves. They will increase
in proportion as they obtain a higher yield from their soil. So
far, so good. But if there be a surplus of population, and if
this surplus population refuses to overflow into the world
outside, or cannot do so because foreign countries close their
doors, where will it find its food? Industry is called upon
to rectify the situation. The surplus population will become
factory- workers. If the country does not possess the motive
power for its machines, the iron to make them, the raw
material for its manufactured goods, it will try to borrow
them from foreign countries. It will pay its debts, and receive
the food it cannot obtain through home production, by
sending back manufactured products to other countries. The
factory-workers will thus become "internal emigrants". The
foreign country provides them with employment, just as if
they had actually settled within its frontiers; it prefers to
leave them or perhaps they prefer to stay where they are;
but on foreign countries they are dependent. If these countries
cease to accept their products, or cease to supply them with
the material for manufacture, they are just condemned to
starve to death unless they decide, carrying the whole

R

250 MECHANICS AND MYSTICISM CH.

country with them, to go and seize what is refused to them.
That means war. It goes without saying that things never
happen so simply as that. Without being exactly in danger of
starving to death, people consider that life is not worth living
if they cannot have comforts, pleasures, luxuries; the national
industry is considered insufficient if it provides for a bare
existence, if it does not provide affluence; a country considers
itself incomplete if it has not good ports, colonies, etc. All
this may lead to war. But the outline we have just traced
sufficiently emphasizes the main causes: increase in popula-
tion, closing of markets, cutting off of fuel and raw material.
To eliminate these causes or mitigate their effect, such is
the essential task of an international organism with the aboli-
tion of war as its aim. The gravest of all is over-population.
In a country with too low a birth-rate, like France, the State
should doubtless encourage the increase of population: a
certain French economist, though the most thorough-going
opponent of State intervention, used to demand that a bonus
be granted to families for every child after the third. But then,
conversely, would it not be possible, in over-populated coun-
tries, to impose more or less heavy taxes on every super-
numerary child? The State would have the right to interfere,
to establish the paternity, in short, take measures which under
other circumstances would be inquisitorial, since the State is
tacitly expected to guarantee the food supply of the country
and hence that of the child that has been brought into the
world. We recognize the difficulty of fixing an official limit to
the population, even if the figure be elastic. If we give 'the
outline of a solution, it is merely to point out that the problem
does not strike us as insoluble: more competent judges will
find something better. But one fact is certain: Europe is over-
populated, the world will soon be in the same condition, and
if the self-reproduction of man is not "rationalized", as his
labour is beginning to be, we shall have war. In no other
matter is it so dangerous to rely upon instinct. Antique mytho-
logy realized this when it coupled the goddess of love with
the god of war. Let Venus have her way, and she will bring
you Mars. You will not escape regimentation (an unpleasant

iv WAR AND THE INDUSTRIAL AGE 25!

word, but an unavoidable thing). What will happen when
problems almost equally grave arise, such as the distribution
of raw materials, the more or less unrestricted movement of
products, the general problem of dealing justly with opposing
demands represented by both sides as vital? It is a dangerous
mistake to think that an international institution can obtain
permanent peace without having the authority to intervene
in the legislation of the various countries, and even perhaps
in their government. Maintain the principle of the sovereignty
of the State, if you will: it is bound to be whittled down in its
application to individual cases. We repeat, no single one of
these difficulties is insurmountable, if an adequate portion of
humanity is determined to surmount them. But we must face
up to them, and realize what has to be given up if war is to
be abolished.

Now, would it not be possible to shorten the road before us,
or even to smooth away all the difficulties at once, instead of
negotiating them one by one? Let us set aside the main
question, that of population, which will have to be resolved
for its own sake, whatever happens. The others arise prin-
cipally from the direction taken by our existence since the
great expansion of industry. We demand material comfort,
amenities and luxuries. We set out to enjoy ourselves. What
if our life were to become more ascetic? Mysticism is un-
doubtedly at the origin of great moral transformations. And
mankind seems to be as far away as ever from it. But who
knows? In the course of our last chapter we fancied we had
caught sight of a possible link between the mysticism of the
West and its industrial civilization. The matter needs to be
gone into thoroughly. Everybody feels that the immediate
future is going to depend largely on the organization of
industry and the conditions it will impose or accept. We have
just seen that the problem of peace between nations is con-
tingent on this problem. That of peace at home depends on
it just as much. Must we live in fear, or may we live in hope?
For a long time it was taken for granted that industrialism
and mechanization would bring happiness to mankind. To-
day one is ready to lay to their door all the ills from which we

252 MECHANICS AND MYSTICISM CH.

suffer. Never, it is said, was humanity more athirst for
pleasure, luxury and wealth. An irresistible force seems to
drive it more and more violently towards the satisfaction of
its basest desires. That may be, but let us go back to the im-
pulsion at the origin. If it was a strong one, a slight deviation
at the beginning may have been enough to produce a wider
and wider divergence between the point aimed at and the
object reached. In that case, we should not concern ourselves
so much with the divergence as with the impulsion. True,
things never get done of themselves. Humanity will only
change if it is intent upon changing. But perhaps it has al-
ready prepared the means of doing so. Perhaps it is nearer
the goal than it thinks. Since we have brought a charge
against industrial effort, let us examine it more closely. This
will form the conclusion of the present work.

The alternations of ebb and flow in history have often been
discussed. All prolonged action, it would seem, brings about
a reaction in the opposite direction. Then it starts anew, and
the pendulum swings on indefinitely. True, in this case the
pendulum is endowed with memory, and is not the same
when it swings back as on the outward swing, since it is then
richer by all the intermediate experience. This is why the
image of a spiral movement, which has sometimes been used,
is perhaps more correct than that of the oscillations of a
pendulum. As a matter of fact, there are psychological and
social causes which we might a priori predict as productive of
such effects. The uninterrupted enjoyment of an eagerly-
sought advantage engenders weariness or indifference; it
seldom fulfils completely its promise; it brings with it unfore-
seen drawbacks; it ends by making conspicuous the good side
of what has been given up and arousing a desire to get it back.
The desire will be found principally in the rising generations,
who have not experienced the ills of the past, and have not
had to extricate themselves from them. Whereas the parents
congratulate themselves on the present state of things as an
acquisition for which they remember paying dearly, the
children give it no more thought than the air they breathe; on

iv EVOLUTION OF TENDENCIES 253

the other hand, they are alive to disadvantages which are
nothing but the reverse side of the advantages so painfully
won for them. Thus may arise a wish to put the clock back.
Such actions and reactions are characteristic of the modern
State, not by reason of any historical fatality, but because
parliamentary government was conceived in part with the
very object of providing a channel for discontent. The powers
that be receive but moderate praise for the good they do; they
are there to do it; but their slightest mistake is scored; and
all mistakes are stored up, until their accumulated weight
causes the government to fall. If there are two opposing
parties and two only, the game will go on with perfect
regularity. Each team will come back into power, bringing
with it the prestige of principles which have apparently re-
mained intact during the period in which it had no respon-
sibility to bear: principles sit with the Opposition. In reality
the Opposition will have profited, if it is intelligent, by the
experience it has left the party in power to work out; it -will
have more or less modified the content of its ideas and hence
the significance of its principles. Thus progress becomes
possible, in spite of the swing of the pendulum, or rather
because of it, if only men care about it. But, in such cases, the
oscillation between the two opposite extremes is the result of
certain very simple contrivances set up by society, or certain
very obvious tendencies of the individual. It is not the effect
of a paramount necessity towering above the particular causes
of alternation and dominating human events in general. Does
such a necessity exist?

We do not believe in the fatality of history. There is no
obstacle which cannot be broken down by wills sufficiently
keyed up, if they deal with it in time. There is thus no un-
escapable historic law. But there are biological laws; and the
human societies, in so far as they are partly willed by nature,
pertain to biology on this particular point. If the evolution
of the organized world takes place according to certain laws,
I mean by virtue of certain forces, it is impossible that the
psychological evolution of individual and social man should
entirely renounce these habits of life. Now we have shown

254 MECHANICS AND MYSTICISM CH.

elsewhere that the essence of a vital tendency is to develop
fan-wise, creating, by the mere fact of its growth, divergent
directions, each of which will receive a certain portion of the
impetus. We added that there was nothing mysterious about
this law. It simply expresses the fact that a tendency is the
forward thrust of an indistinct multiplicity, which is, more-
over, indistinct, and multiplicity, only if we consider it in retro-
spect, when the multitudinous views taken of its past undivided
character allow us to reconstruct it with elements which
were actually created by its development. Let us imagine that
orange is the only colour that has as yet made its appearance
in the world. Would it be already a composite of yellow and
red? Obviously not. But it will have been composed of yellow
and red when these two colours are born in their turn; from
that hour the original orange colour can be looked at from the
twofold point of view of red and yellow; and if we supposed,
by a trick of fancy, that yellow and red appeared through
an intensification of orange, we should have a very simple
example of what we call fan- wise growth. But there is no real
necessity for fancy and comparisons. All we need is to look at
life without any idea of artificial recomposition supervening.
Some psychologists hold the act of volition to be a composite
reflex, others are inclined to see in the reflex activity a curtail-
ment of volition. The truth is that the reflex and the volun-
tary actions embody two views, now rendered possible, of a
primordial, indivisible activity, which was neither the one
nor the other, but which becomes retroactively, through them,
both at once. We could say the same of instinct and intelli-
gence, of animal life and vegetable life, of many other pairs of
divergent and complementary tendencies. Only, in the general
evolution of life, the tendencies thus created by a process of
dichotomy are to be found in species different from one
another; they have set forth, each independently, to seek their
fortunes in the world; and the material form they have
assumed prevents them from reuniting to bring back again,
stronger than it was, more complex, more fully evolved, the
original tendency. Not so in the evolution of the psychical
and social life. Here the tendencies, born of the process of

iv " DICHOTOMY " AND " TWO-FOLD FRENZY " 255

splitting, develop in the same individual, or in the same
society. As a rule, they can only be developed in succession.
If there are two of them, as is generally the case, one of them
will be clung to first; with this one we shall move more or
less forward, generally as far as possible; then, with what we
have acquired in the course of this evolution, we shall come
back to take up the one we left behind. That one will then be
developed in its turn, the former being neglected, and our
new effort will be continued until, reinforced by new acquisi-
tions, we can take up the first one again and push it further
forward still. Since, during the operation, we are entirely
given up to one of the two tendencies, since it alone counts,
we are apt to say that it alone is positive and that the other
was only its negation; if we like to put things in this way, the
other is, as a matter of fact, its opposite. It will then be said
and this will be more or less true, as the case may be
that the progress was due to an oscillation between the two
opposites, the situation moreover not being the same and
ground having been gained by the time the pendulum has
swung back to its original position. But it does sometimes
happen that this is quite the correct way of putting it, and that
there was really oscillation between two opposites. This is
when a tendency, advantageous in itself, cannot be moderated
otherwise than by the action of a counter-tendency, which
hence becomes advantageous also. It would seem as though
the wise course, then, would be a co-operation of the two
tendencies, the first intervening when circumstances require,
the other restraining it when it threatens to go too far. Un-
fortunately, it is difficult to say where exaggeration and danger
begin. Sometimes the mere fact of going further than
appeared reasonable leads to new surroundings, creates a
new situation which removes the danger, at the same time
emphasizing the advantage. This is especially the case with
the very general tendencies which determine the trend of a
society, and whose development necessarily extends over a
more or less considerable number of generations. An intelli-
gence, even a superhuman one, cannot say where this will
lead to, since action on the move creates its own route, creates

256 MECHANICS AND MYSTICISM CH.

to a very great extent the conditions under which it is to be
fulfilled, and thus baffles all calculation. In such a case, one
pushes further and further afield, often only stopping on the
very brink of disaster. The counter-tendency then steps into
the place that has been vacated; alone, in its turn, it will go
as far as it can go. If the other was called action, then
this will be reaction. As the two tendencies, if they had
journeyed together, would have moderated each other, as
their interpenetration in an undivided primitive tendency is
the very definition of moderation, the mere fact of taking up
all the room imparts to each of them such an impetus that
it bolts ahead as the barriers collapse one by one; there
is something frenzied about it. Now we must not make
exaggerated use of the word "law" in a field which is that
of liberty, but we may use this convenient term when we
are confronted with important facts which show sufficient
regularity. So we will call law of dichotomy that law which
apparently brings about a materialization, by a mere splitting
up, of tendencies which began by being two photographic
views, so to speak, of one and the same tendency. And we
propose to designate law of twofold frenzy the imperative
demand, forthcoming from each of the two tendencies as soon
as it is materialized by the splitting, to be pursued to the very
end as if there was an end! Once more, it is difficult not to
wonder whether the simple tendency would not have done
better to grow without dividing in two, thus being kept within
bounds by the very coincidence of its propulsive power with
the power of stopping, which would then have been virtually,
but not actually, a distinct and contrary force of impulsion.
There would have been, then, no risk of stumbling into
absurdity; there would have been an insurance against
disaster. Yes, but this would not have given the maximum of
creation, in quantity and in quality. It is necessary to keep
on to the bitter end in one direction, to find out what it will
yield: when we can go no further, we turn back, with all we
have acquired, to set off in the direction from which we had
turned aside. Doubtless, looked at from the outside, these
comings and goings appear only as the opposing principles of

iv LAW OF " TWO-FOLD FRENZY " 257

the two tendencies, the futile attempt of the one to thwart the
other, the ultimate failure of the second and the revenge of
the first: man loves the dramatic; he is strongly inclined to
pick out from a whole more or less extended period of history
those characteristics which make of it a struggle between two
parties, two societies or two principles, each of them in turn
coming off victorious. But the struggle is here only the super-
ficial aspect of an advance. The truth is that a tendency on
which two different views are possible can only put forth its
maximum, in quantity or quality, if it materializes these two
possibilities into moving realities, each one of which leaps
forward and monopolizes the available space, while the other
is on the watch unceasingly for its own turn to come. Only
thus will the content of the original tendency develop, if
indeed we can speak of a content when no one, not even the
tendency itself if it achieved consciousness, could tell what
will issue from it. It supplies the effort, and the result is a
surprise. Of such are the workings of nature; the struggles
which she stages for us do not betoken pugnacity so much as
curiosity. And it is precisely when it imitates nature, when it
yields to the original impulsion, that the progress of humanity
assumes a certain regularity and conforms though very im-
perfectly, be it said to such laws as those we have stated.
But the time has come to close this all too long parenthesis.
Let us merely show how our two laws would apply in the
case which led us to open it.

We were dealing with the concern for comfort and luxury
which has apparently become the main preoccupation of
humanity. When we consider how it has developed the spirit
of invention, that so many inventions are the application of
science, and that science is destined to extend its scope
indefinitely, we should be tempted to believe in indefinite
progress in the same direction. Never, indeed, do the satis-
factions with which new inventions meet old needs induce
humanity to leave things at that; new needs arise, just as
imperious and increasingly numerous. We have seen the race
for comfort proceeding faster and faster, on a track along
which are surging ever denser crowds. To-day it is a

258 MECHANICS AND MYSTICISM CH.

stampede. But ought not this very frenzy open our eyes? Was
there not some other frenzy to which it has succeeded, and
which developed in the opposite direction an activity of
which the present frenzy is the complement? In point of fact,
it is from the fifteenth or sixteenth century onward that men
seemed to aspire to easier material conditions. Throughout
the Middle Ages, an ascetic ideal had predominated. There
is no need to recall the exaggerations to which it led; here
already you had frenzy. It may be alleged that asceticism was
confined to a very small minority, and this is true. But just
as mysticism, the privilege of a few, was popularized by
religion, so concentrated asceticism, which was doubtless
exceptional, became diluted for the rank and file of mankind
into a general indifference to the conditions of daily existence.
There was for one and all an absence of comfort which to us
is astonishing. Rich and poor did without superfluities which
we consider as necessities. It has been pointed out that if the
lord lived better than the peasant, we must understand by this
that he had more abundant food. 1 Otherwise, the differ-
ence was slight. Here we are, then, in the presence of two
divergent tendencies which have succeeded each other and
have behaved, both of them, frantically. So, we may presume
that they correspond to the focusing from two opposite
positions of one primordial tendency, which in this way
contrived to evolve from itself, in quantity and quality, every-
thing that was in its capacity, even more than it had to give,
proceeding along each of the two roads, one after the other,
getting back into one direction with everything that had been
picked up by the way in the other. That signifies oscillation
and progress, progress by oscillation. And we should expect,
after the ever-increasing complexity of life, a return to sim-
plicity. This return is obviously not a certainty; the future of
humanity remains indeterminate, precisely because it is on
humanity that it depends. But if, ahead of us, lie only possi-
bilities or probabilities, which we shall examine presently, we
cannot say the same for the past: the two opposite develop-

1 See Gina Lombroso's interesting work, La Ranfon du machinisme
(Paris, 193)-

iv RETURN TO A SIMPLER LIFE 259

ments which we have just indicated are indeed those of a
single original tendency.

And indeed the history of ideas bears witness to it. Out of
Socratic thought, pursued in two different directions which
in Socrates were complementary, came the Cyrenaic and the
Cynic doctrines: the one insisted that we should demand
from life the greatest possible number of satisfactions, the
other that we should learn to do without them. They
developed into Epicureanism and Stoicism with their two
opposing tendencies, laxity and tension. If there were the
least doubt about the common essence of the two mental
attitudes to which these principles correspond, it would
suffice to note that, in the Epicurean school itself, along with
popular Epicureanism which was at times the unbridled
pursuit of pleasure, there was the Epicureanism of Epicurus,
according to which the supreme pleasure was to need no
pleasures. The truth is that the two principles are at the heart
of the traditional conception of happiness. Here is a word
which is commonly used to designate something intricate
and ambiguous, one of those ideas which humanity has
intentionally left vague, so that each individual might inter-
pret it after his own fashion. But in whatever sense it is under-
stood, there is no happiness without security I mean with-
out the prospect of being able to rely on the permanence of a
state into which one has settled oneself. This assurance is to
be found either in the mastering of things, or in the mastering
of self which makes one independent of things. In both cases
thefe is delight in one's strength, whether inwardly per-
ceived or outwardly manifested: the one may lead to pride,
the other to vanity. But the simplification and complication
do indeed follow from a "dichotomy", are indeed apt to
develop into "double frenzy", in fact have all that is required
to alternate periodically.

This being so, as we have said above, there is nothing
improbable in the return to a simpler life. Science itself
might show us the way. Whereas physics and chemistry help
us to satisfy and encourage us to multiply our needs, it is
conceivable that physiology and medical science may reveal

260 MECHANICS AND MYSTICISM CH.

more and more clearly to us all the dangers of this multiplica-
tion, all the disappointments which accompany the majority
of our satisfactions. I enjoy a well-prepared dish of meat; to
a vegetarian, who used to like it as much as I do, the mere
sight of meat is sickening. It may be alleged that we are both
right, and that there is no more arguing about taste than about
colour. Perhaps: but I cannot help noting that my vegetarian
is thoroughly convinced he will never revert to his old inclina-
tions, whereas I am not nearly so sure that I shall always stick
to mine. He has been through both experiments; I have only
tried one. His repulsion grows stronger as he fixes his atten-
tion on it, whereas my satisfaction is largely a matter of in-
attention and tends to pale in a strong light. I do believe it
would fade away altogether, if decisive experiments came to
prove, as it is not impossible they will, that I am directly and
slowly poisoning myself by eating meat. 1 I was taught in my
school days that the composition of foodstuffs was known, the
requirements of our organs also, that it was possible to deduce
from this the necessary and sufficient ration to maintain life.
The master would have been very much surprised to hear
that chemical analysis did not take into account "vitamins"
whose presence in food is indispensable to health. It will
probably be found that more than one malady, for which
medical science has no cure, takes its remote origin from
"deficiencies" of which we have no inkling. The only sure
means of absorbing all we need would be to have our food
subjected to no preparation, perhaps even (who knows) not
cooked at all. Here again the belief in the heredity of acquired
habits has done great harm. It is commonly said that the
human stomach has lost the habit, that we could not feed
ourselves nowadays like primitive man. This is true, if taken
as meaning that we have let certain natural tendencies lie
dormant from our infancy, and that it would be difficult to
reawaken them in middle age. But that we are born modified
is hardly probable: even if our stomach is different from that

1 We hasten to state that we have no particular knowledge of this
subject. We have chosen the example of meat as we might have that of
any other usual food.

iv RETURN TO A SIMPLER LIFE 261

of our prehistoric ancestors, the difference is not due to mere
habit contracted down the ages. It will not be long before
science enlightens us on all these points. Let us suppose that
it does so in the sense we foresee: the mere reform of our
food supply would have immeasurable reactions on our in-
dustry, our trade, our agriculture, all of which it would
considerably simplify. What about our other needs? The
demands of the procreative senses are imperious, but they
would be quickly settled, if we hearkened to nature alone. The
trouble is that around a violent but paltry sensation, taken as
an original theme, humanity has performed an endlessly in-
creasing number of variations: so many, in fact, that almost any
object struck on some particular point now gives out a sound
which rings like that haunting music. Thus the senses are con-
stantly being roused by the imagination. Sex- appeal is the
keynote of our whole civilization. Here again science has some-
thing to say, and it will say it one day so clearly that all must
listen: there will no longer be pleasure in so much love of
pleasure. Woman will hasten the coming of this time according
as she real ly and sincerely strives to become man 's equal , instead
of remaining the instrument she still is, waiting to vibrate
under the musician's bow. Let the transformation take place:
our life will be both more purposeful and more simple. What
woman demands in the way of luxuries in order to please
man, and, at the rebound, to please herself, will become to a
great extent unnecessary. There will be less waste, and less
enviousness. Luxury, pleasure and comfort are indeed closely
akin, though the connexion between them is not what it is
generally supposed to be. It is our way to arrange them in a
certain gradation, we are supposed to move up the scale from
comfort to luxury: when we have made sure of our comfort
we want to cap it with pleasures, then comes love of luxury
on top of all. But this is a purely intellectualist psychology,
which imagines that our feelings are the exact counterpart of
their objects. Because luxuries cost more than mere conveni-
ences, and pleasure more than comfort, they are supposed
to be keeping pace with goodness knows what correspond-
ing desire. The truth is that it is generally for the sake

262 MECHANICS AND MYSTICISM CH.

of our luxuries that we want our comforts, because the com-
forts we lack look to us like luxuries, and because we want to
imitate and equal those people who can afford them. In the
beginning was vanity. How many delicacies are sought after
solely because they are expensive! For years civilized people
spent a great part of their efforts abroad in procuring spices.
It is amazing to think that this was the supreme object of
navigation, so perilous in those days; that for this thousands
of men risked their lives; that the courage, the energy and
the spirit of adventure, of which the discovery of America
was a mere incident, were mainly employed in the search for
ginger, cloves, pepper and cinnamon. Who troubles about
these flavourings which so long tasted delicious, now that they
can be had for a few pence from the grocer round the corner?
Such facts as these are sad reading for the moralist. But
reflect a moment, they contain cause for hope as well. The
continual craving for creature comforts, the pursuit of
pleasure, the unbridled love of luxury, all these things which
fill us with so much anxiety for the future of humanity, be-
cause it seems to find in them solid satisfactions, all this
will appear as a balloon which man has madly inflated, and
which will deflate just as suddenly. We know that one frenzy
brings on the counter- frenzy. More particularly, the com-
parison of present-day facts with those of the past is a warning
to us to regard as transient tastes which appear to be per-
manent. Since to-day the supreme ambition for so many
men is to have a car, let us recognize the incomparable
services rendered by motor-cars, admire the mechanical
marvel they are, hope that they will multiply and spread
wherever they are needed, but let us say to ourselves that a
. short time hence they may not be so greatly in demand just
as an amenity or "for swank*', though the chances are that
they may not be quite so neglected, and we hope not, as
cloves and cinnamon are to-day.

Here we come to the essential point of our discussion. We
have just cited an example of the craving for luxuries arising
from a mechanical invention. Many are of the opinion that
it is mechanical invention in general which has developed the

iv TRUE VOCATION OF MACHINERY 263

taste for luxuries, and indeed for mere comfort. Nay, if it is
generally admitted that our material needs will go on in-
definitely growing more numerous and more imperious, this
is because there seems to be no reason why humanity should
abandon the path of mechanical invention, once it has started
on it. Let us add that, the more science advances, the more
inventions are suggested by its discoveries; in many cases
from theory to application is but a step; and since science
cannot stop, it really does look indeed as though there could
be no end to the satisfying of our old needs and the creation
of new ones. But we must first ascertain whether the spirit
of invention necessarily creates artificial needs, or whether
in this case it is not the artificial need which has guided the
spirit of invention.

The second hypothesis is by far the more probable. It is
confirmed by recent research on the origin of mechanization. 1
The fact has been recalled that man has always invented
machines, that antiquity has remarkable ones to show, that
many a clever mechanical device was thought of long before
the development of modern science, and, at a later stage, inde-
pendently of it: even to-day a mere workman, without scien-
tific culture, will hit on improvements which have never
occurred to skilled engineers. Mechanical invention is a
natural gift. Doubtless its effects were limited so long as it
was confined to utilizing actual, and as it were visible, forces:
muscular effort, wind or water power. The machine only
developed its full efficiency from the day when it became
possible to place at its service, by a simple process of releasing,
the potential energies stored up for millions of years, bor-
rowed from the sun, deposited in coal, oil, etc. But that was
the day when the steam-engine was invented, and we know
that this invention was not the outcome of theoretical con-
siderations. Let us hasten to add that the progress made,
slow enough at first, assumed giant proportions as soon as
science took a hand. It is none the less true that the spirit of
mechanical invention, which runs between narrow banks so

1 We again refer the reader to Gina Lombroso's fine work. Cf. also
Mantoux, La Revolution industrielle an dix-huitieme siccle.

264 MECHANICS AND MYSTICISM CH.

long as it is left to itself, but expands indefinitely after its
conjunction with science, yet remains distinct from it, and
could, if need be, do without it. Similarly we have the Rhone
entering the Lake 'of Geneva, apparently mingling with its
waters, but showing, when it leaves it again, that it has pre-
served its independence.

There has not been then, as some people are inclined to
believe, a demand on the part of science, imposing on men,
by the mere fact of its development, increasingly artificial
needs. If that were so, humanity would be doomed to a grow-
ing materiality, for the progress of science will never cease.
But the truth is that science has given what was asked of it,
and has not in this case taken the initiative; it is the spirit of
invention which has not always operated in the best interests
of humanity. It has created a mass of new needs; it has not
taken the trouble to ensure for the majority of men, for all
if that were possible, the satisfaction of old needs. To put it
more clearly: though not neglecting the necessary, it has
thought too much about the superfluous. It may be said that
these two terms are hard to define, and that what are luxuries
to some people are necessities to others. True, and it would
be easy enough here to lose one's way amid subtle and fine
distinctions. But there are cases where subtlety should be
cast aside and a broad view taken. Millions of men never get
enough to eat. There are some who starve to death. If the
land produced much more, there would be far fewer chances
of not getting enough to eat, 1 or of starving to death. Over-
production here is but a deceptio visus. If mechanization is in
any way to blame, it is for not having sufficiently devoted
itself to helping man in his agricultural labour. It will be said
that agricultural implements exist and are now widely used.
I grant it, but all that mechanization has done here to lighten
man's burden, all that science has done on its side to increase

1 There are doubtless periods of "over-production" extending to
agricultural products and which may even start from these. But they are
obviously not due to the fact that there is too much food for the con-
sumption of mankind. The fact is simply that, production in general not
being properly organized, there is no market for exchange.

iv TRUE VOCATION OF MACHINERY 265

the yield of the soil, amounts to comparatively little. We
feel strongly that agriculture, which nourishes man, should
dominate all else, in any case be the first concern of industry
itself. Generally speaking, industry has not troubled enough
about the greater or lesser importance of needs to be satisfied.
It simply complied with public taste, and manufactured with
no other thought than that of selling. Here as elsewhere, we
should like to see a central, organizing intelligence, which
would co-ordinate industry and agriculture and allot to the
machine its proper place, I mean the place where it can best
serve humanity. Thus, when the case against mechanization
is stated, the main grievance is often left out. The charge is
first that it converts the workman into a mere machine, and
then that it leads to a uniformity of production which shocks
the aesthetic sense. But if the machine procures for the work-
man more free time, and if the workman uses this increase
of leisure for something else than the so-called pleasures
which an ill-directed industry has put within the reach of all,
he will develop his intelligence as he chooses, instead of
remaining content with the development which would have
been imposed upon him, and necessarily maintained within
very narrow limits, by a return (impossible in fact) to tools,
were machines abolished. As regards uniformity of products,
the disadvantage would be negligible, if the economy of time
and labour thus realized by the mass of the nation permitted
the furtherance of intellectual culture and the development
of true originality. An author, writing about the Americans,
criticizes them for all wearing the same hat. But the head
should come before the hat. Allow me to furnish the interior
of my head as I please, and I shall put up with a hat like every-
body else's. Such is not our grievance against mechanization.
Without disputing the services it has rendered to man by
greatly developing the means of satisfying real needs, we
reproach it with having too strongly encouraged artificial
ones, with having fostered luxury, with having favoured the
towns to the detriment of the countryside, lastly with having
widened the gap and revolutionized the relations between
employer and employed, between capital and labour. These

266 MECHANICS AND MYSTICISM CH.

effects, indeed, can all be corrected, and then the machine
would be nothing but a great benefactor. But then, humanity
must set about simplifying its existence with as much frenzy
as it devoted to complicating it. The initiative can come from
humanity alone, for it is humanity and not the alleged force
of circumstances, still less a fatality inherent to the machine,
which has started the spirit of invention along a certain track.
But did humanity wholly intend this? Was the impulsion
it gave at the beginning exactly in the same direction that
industrialism has actually taken? What is at the outset only
an imperceptible deviation becomes in the end a consider-
able divergence, if the road has been straight and the journey
long. Now, there is no doubt that the earliest features of what
was destined later to become mechanization were sketched
out at the same time as the first yearnings after democracy.
The connexion between the two tendencies becomes plainly
visible in the eighteenth century. It is a striking feature of
the "Encyclopaedists". Should we not, then, suppose that it
was a breath of democracy which urged the spirit of inven-
tion onward, that spirit as old as humanity, but insufficiently
active so long as it was not given the necessary scope? There
was surely no thought then of luxuries for all, or even of
comforts for all. But there might have been the desire of an
assured material existence, of dignity in security for all. Was
this a conscious wish? We do not believe in the unconscious
in history: the great undercurrents of thought of which so
much has been written are due to the fact that masses of men
have been carried along by one or several individuals. These
individuals knew what they were doing, but did not foresee
all the consequences. We, who know what followed, cannot
help transferring back the image of it to the beginning: the
present, reflected back into the past and perceived inside it
as though in a mirror, is then what we call the unconscious
of the past. The retroactivity of the present is at the origin
of many philosophical delusions. We shall be careful, then,
not to attribute to the fifteenth, sixteenth and eighteenth
centuries (and still less the seventeenth, which is so different
and has been considered as a sublime parenthesis) a concern

iv TRUE VOCATION OF MACHINERY 267

for democratic ideas comparable to our own. Neither shall
we attribute to them the vision of the power which lay hidden
in the spirit of invention. It is none the less true that the
Reformation, the Renaissance and the first symptoms or pre-
cursory signs of the great inventive impetus date from the
same period. It is not impossible that there were here three
reactions, interrelated, against the form taken until then by
the Christian ideal. This ideal subsisted just the same, but it
showed like a heavenly body that had up to then always
turned the same face towards man: people now began to
catch a glimpse of the other side, though they did not always
realize that it was the same body. That mysticism evokes
asceticism there is no doubt. Both the one and the other will
ever be peculiar to the few. But that true, complete, active
mysticism aspires to radiate, by virtue of the charity which is
its essence, is none the less certain. How could it spread, even
diluted and enfeebled as it must necessarily be, in a humanity
obsessed by the fear of hunger? Man will only rise above
earthly things if a powerful equipment supplies him with the
requisite fulcrum. He must use matter as a support if he
wants to get away from matter. In other words, the mystical
summons up the mechanical. This has not been sufficiently
realized, because machinery, through a mistake at the points,
has been switched off on to a track at the end of which lies
exaggerated comfort and luxury for the few, rather than
liberation for all. We are struck by the accidental result, we
do not see mechanization as it should be, as what it is in
essence. Let us go further still. If our organs are natural
instruments, our instruments must then be artificial organs.
The workman's tool is the continuation of his arm, the tool-
equipment of humanity is therefore a continuation of its
body. Nature, in endowing us with an essentially tool-making
intelligence, prepared for us in this way a certain expansion.
But machines which run on oil or coal or "white coal", and
which convert into motion a potential energy stored up for
millions of years, have actually imparted to our organism an
extension so vast, have endowed it with a power so mighty,
so out of proportion to the size and strength of that organism,

268 MECHANICS AND MYSTICISM CH.

that surely none of all this was foreseen in this structural plan
of our species: here was a unique stroke of luck, the greatest
material success of man on the planet. A spiritual impulsion
had been given, perhaps, at the beginning: the extension took
place automatically, helped as it were by a chance blow of the
pick-axe which struck against a miraculous treasure under-
ground. 1 Now, in this body, distended out of all proportion,
the soul remains what it was, too small to fill it, too weak to
guide it. Hence the gap between the two. Hence the tremend-
ous social, political and international problems which are just
so many definitions of this gap, and which provoke so many
chaotic and ineffectual efforts to fill it. What we need are new
reserves of potential energy moral energy this time. So
let us not merely say, as we did above, that the mystical
summons up the mechanical. We must add that the body,
now larger, calls for a bigger soul, and that mechanism should
mean mysticism. The origins of the process of mechanization
are indeed more mystical than we might imagine. Machinery
will find its true vocation again, it will render services in pro-
portion to its power, only if mankind, which it has bowed
still lower to the earth, can succeed, through it, in standing
erect and looking heavenwards.

In a long series of writings, which for depth and forceful-
ness are beyond praise, M. Ernest Seilliere shows how national
ambitions claim for themselves divine missions: "imperial-
ism" naturally becomes "mysticism". If we give to this latter
word the sense M. Ernest Seilliere 2 attributes to it, and which
his many books have made abundantly clear, the fact is 'un-
deniable; by noting it, by linking it up with its causes and
following it in its effects, the author makes an invaluable
contribution to the philosophy of history. But he himself
would probably be of the opinion that mysticism taken in
this sense, and indeed understood in this way by "imperial-
ism" such as he exhibits it, is but a counterfeit of true

1 We are speaking figuratively, of course. Coal was known long before
the steam-engine turned it into a treasure.

2 A meaning only part of which we deal with here, as also in the case
of the word "imperialism".

iv THE SUMMONS OF THE HERO 269

mysticism, the mysticism of "dynamic religion" which we
studied in the last chapter. We believe the counterfeiting to
have taken place in the following way. It was a borrowing
from the "static religion" of the ancients, stripped of its old
tags and left in its static form with the new label supplied by
dynamic religion. There was indeed nothing fraudulent in
this imitation; it was almost unintentional. For we must
remember that "static religion" is natural to man, and that
nature does not alter. The innate beliefs of our ancestors sub-
sist in the depths of our inner selves; they reappear as soon
as they are no longer inhibited by opposing forces. Now, one
of the essential characteristics of ancient religions was the idea
of a link between the human groups and the deities attached
to them. The gods of the city fought with and for the city.
This belief is incompatible with true mysticism, I ftiean with
the feeling which certain souls have that they are the instru-
ments of God who loves all men with an equal love, and who
bids them to love each other. But, rising from the darkest
depths of the soul to the surface of consciousness, and meeting
there with the image of true mysticism as the modern mystics
have revealed it to the world, it instinctively decks itself out
in this garb; it endows the God of the modern mystic with the
nationalism of the ancient gods. It is in this sense that imper-
ialism becomes mysticism. So that if we keep to true mysti-
cism, we shall judge it incompatible with imperialism. At the
most it will be admitted, as we have just put it, that mysticism
cannot be disseminated without encouraging a very special
"Will to power". This will be a sovereignty, not over men, but
over things, precisely in order that man shall no longer have
so much sovereignty over man.

Let a mystic genius but appear, he will draw after him a
humanity already vastly grown in body, and whose soul he
has transfigured. He will yearn to make of it a new species,
or rather deliver it from the necessity of being a species; for
every species means a collective halt, and complete existence
is mobility in individuality. The great breath of life which
swept our planet had carried organization as far along as
nature, alike docile and recalcitrant, permitted. Nature let

270 MECHANICS AND MYSTICISM CH.

us repeat it is the name we give to the totality of com-
pliances and resistances which life encounters in raw matter
a totality which we treat, just as the biologist does, as
though intentions could be attributed to it. A body compact
of creative intelligence, and, round about that intelligence, a
fringe of intuition, was the most complete thing nature had
found it possible to produce. Such was the human body.
There the evolution of life stopped. But now intelligence,
raising the construction of instruments to a degree of com-
plexity and perfection which nature (so incapable of mechani-
cal construction) had not even foreseen, pouring into these
machines reserves of energy which nature (so heedless of
economy) had never even thought of, has endowed us with
powers beside which those of our body barely count: they
will be altogether limitless when science is able to liberate
the force which is enclosed, or rather condensed, in the slightest
particle of ponderable matter. The material barrier then has
well nigh vanished. To-morrow the way will be clear, in the
very direction of the breath which had carried life to the
point where it had to stop. Let once the summons of the hero
come, we shall not all follow it, but we shall all feel that we
ought to, and we shall see the path before us, which will
become a highway if we pass along it. At the same time, for
each and every philosophy the mystery of supreme obligation
will be a mystery no longer: a journey had been begun, it
had had to be interrupted; by setting out once more we are
merely willing again what we had willed at the start. It is
always the stop which requires explanation, and not the
movement.

But perhaps it will be just as well not to count too much
on the coming of a great privileged soul. Failing that, some
other influences might divert our attention from the baubles
that amuse us, and the vain shadows for which we fight.

What influence? We have seen how the talent of invention,
assisted by science, had put unsuspected energies at man's
disposal. We were alluding here to physico-chemical energies,
and to a science that was concerned with matter. But what
about things spiritual? Has spirit been scientifically inves-

iv PSYCHICAL RESEARCH 271

tigated as thoroughly as it might have been? Do we know to
what results such investigation might lead? Science attended
first to matter; for three whole centuries it had no other
object; even to-day, when we leave the word unqualified, it
is understood that we mean the science of matter. We have
given the reasons for this on another occasion. We have indi-
cated why the scientific study of matter preceded that of
the spirit. The most pressing needs had to be taken first.
Geometry existed already; it had been considerably advanced
by the ancients; the thing was to extract from mathematics
all it could give in explanation of the world in which we
live. Nor was it desirable, indeed, to begin by the science of
the spirit; it would not have attained, unaided, the precision,
the rigour, the demand for proof, which have spread from
geometry to physics, to chemistry, to biology, until such
time as they might rebound on to the science of the spirit.
And yet, on the other hand, it has certainly suffered to some
extent from coming so late. For human intelligence has thus
been left time to get scientifically supported, and thus invest
with unquestionable authority, its habit of looking at things
as if they all occupied so much space, of explaining every-
thing in terms of matter. Suppose, then, that it now turns its
attention to the soul? It will picture the life of the soul too
as if it were spread out in space; it will extend to this new
object the image it kept of the old: hence the errors of an
atomistic psychology, which does not take into account the
mutual overlapping of psychic states; hence the futile efforts
of* a philosophy that claims to attain to the spirit without
seeking it in real enduring time. Suppose, again, we take the
relation of the body to the soul. The confusion is graver still.
Not only has it started metaphysics on a false scent, it has
diverted science from the observation of certain facts, or
rather it has prevented certain sciences from being born,
causing them to be excommunicated beforehand in the name
of I know not what dogma. For it was agreed that the material
accompaniment of mental activity was its equivalent: every
reality being supposed to have its basis in space, nothing more
is to be found in the mind, so they said, than what a super-

272 MECHANICS AND MYSTICISM CH.

human physiologist could read in the corresponding brain.
Note that this thesis is a pure metaphysical hypothesis, an
arbitrary interpretation of facts. But no less arbitrary is the
metaphysics opposed to it, and according to which each
mental state is supposed to make use of a cerebral state
which merely serves as its instrument; for this metaphysics,
too, mental activity is coextensive with cerebral activity and
corresponds to it at every point in our present life. The second
theory is indeed influenced by the first, having always lain
under its spell. Now, we have attempted to prove, by remov-
ing the preconceived ideas accepted on both sides, by adhere-
ing as close as possible to the configuration of f acts that the
function of the body is something quite different. The activity
of the spirit has indeed a material concomitant, but one which
only corresponds to part of it; the rest lies buried in the
unconscious. The body is indeed for us a means of action,
but it is also an obstacle to perception. Its rcMe is to perform
the appropriate gesture on any and every occasion; for this
very reason it must keep consciousness clear both of such
memories as would not throw any light on the present situa-
tion, together with the perception of objects over which we
have no control. 1 It is, as you like to take it, a filter or a
screen. It maintains in a virtual state anything likely to
hamper the action by becoming actual. It helps us to see
straight in front of us in the interests of what we have to
do; and, on the other hand, it prevents us from looking to
right and left for the mere sake of looking. It plucks for us a
real psychical life out of the immense field of dreams. v ln
a word, our brain is intended neither to create our mental
images nor to treasure them up; it merely limits them, so as
to make them effective. It is the organ of attention to life.
But this means that there must have been provided, either
in the body or in the consciousness limited by the body,
some contrivance expressly designed to screen from man's
perception objects which by their nature are beyond the

1 We have shown above how a sense such as that of sight carries further,
because its instrument makes this extension inevitable (see p. 222. Cf.
Matter e et memoir e t the whole of chap. i.).

iv PSYCHICAL RESEARCH 273

reach of man's action. If these mechanisms get out of order,
the door which they kept shut opens a little way: there enters
in something of a "without" which may be a "beyond". It is
with these abnormal perceptions that "psychical research" is
concerned. To a certain extent the opposition it encounters
is intelligible. It is a science that rests on human evidence,
and human evidence can always be disputed. The typical
scientist is in our eyes the physicist; his attitude of fully
justified confidence towards matter, which is obviously not
out to deceive him, has become for us characteristic of all
science. We are reluctant to go on treating as scientific a form
of investigation which requires of the investigators that they
be ever on the look out for trickery. Their distrust makes us
uneasy, their trust still more so: we know how soon one is apt
to relax one's guard; that it is so perilously easy to glide from
curiosity to credulity. Consequently, certain reluctances, as
we said just now, are readily explained. But the flat denial
which some true scientists oppose to "psychical research"
would never be understood, were it not that, above all, they
regard the facts reported as "improbable"; "impossible"
they would say, if they did not know that there exists no
conceivable means of establishing the impossibility of a fact;
they are none the less convinced, in the main, of that impos-
sibility. And they are convinced of it because they believe
to be undeniable, definitely established, a certain relation
between the organism and consciousness, between body and
spirit. Now we have just seen that this relation is purely
hypothetical, that it is not proved by science, but postulated
by a certain metaphysics. The facts suggest a very different
hypothesis; and if this is admitted, the phenomena recorded
by "psychical research", or at least some of them, become so
likely that we should rather be surprised at the time they have
had to wait before they were studied. We shall not here go
over again a matter we have discussed elsewhere. Let us
merely say, to take what seems to us the most strongly
established fact, that if, for example, the reality of "telepathic
phenomena" is called in doubt after the mutual corroboration
of thousands of statements which have been collected on the

274 MECHANICS AND MYSTICISM CH.

subject, it is human evidence in general that must, in the eyes
of science, be declared to be null and void: what, then, is to
become of history? The truth is that one must make a selection
among the results which "psychical research" puts before
us; that science itself by no means considers them all of equal
value; it distinguishes between what seems to it as certain
and what is simply probable or, at most, possible. But, even
if one retains only a portion of what it would fain look upon
as certain, enough remains for us to divine the immensity of
the terra incognita that it has just begun to explore. Suppose
that a gleam from this unknown world reaches us, visible to
our bodily eyes. What a transformation for humapity, gen-
erally accustomed, whatever it may say, to accept as existing
only what it can see and touch! The information which would
then reach us would perhaps concern only the inferior
portion of the souls, the lowest degree of spirituality. But
this would be sufficient to turn into a live, acting reality a
belief in the life beyond, which is apparently met with in
most men, but which for the most part remains verbal,
abstract, ineffectual. To know to what extent it does count,
it suffices to see how we plunge into pleasure: we should not
cling to it so desperately, did we not see in it so much ground
gained over nothingness, a means whereby we can snap our
fingers at death. In truth, if we were sure, absolutely sure, of
survival, we could not think of anything else. Our pleasures
would still remain, but drab and jejune, because their inten-
sity was merely the attention that we centred upon them.
They would pale like our electric lamps before the mornihg
sun. Pleasure would be eclipsed by joy.

Joy indeed would be that simplicity of life diffused through-
out the world by an ever-spreading mystic intuition; joy, too,
that which would automatically follow a vision of the life
beyond attained through the furtherance of scientific experi-
ment. Failing so thoroughgoing a spiritual reform, we must
be content with shifts and submit to more and more numer-
ous and vexatious regulations, intended to provide a means of
circumventing each successive obstacle that our nature sets
up against our civilization. But, whether we go bail for small

iv JOY 275

measures or great, a decision is imperative. Mankind lies
groaning, half-crushed beneath the weight of its own progress.
Men do not sufficiently realize that their future is in their
own hands. Theirs is the task of determining first of all
whether they want to go on living or not. Theirs the responsi-
bility, then, for deciding if they want merely to live, or intend
to make just the extra effort required for fulfilling, even on
their refractory planet, the essential function of the universe,
which is a machine for the making of gods.

INDEX

Altruism, 25

Ant, 15, 18, 19, 66, 76, 229
Appeal, 24
Automatism, 178, 179

Biology, 82, 135, 213, 219, 253
Buddhism, 23, 190 ff.

Chance, 119 fT.
Christianity: 23

bridge from closed to open

society, 61

creator of religious emotion, 30
message of universal brother-
hood, 62
morality of, 46
relation to Greek philosophy,

204
City (the):

attachment to, 239

of God, 80

limit of obligations of social life,

24, 44, 230
morality of, 45
Collective (mind), 85, 86
Common sense, 86, 87
Custom, 101, 102, 233

Democracy, 242, 244, 266
Dichotomy, law of, 256, 259
Dimorphism, 240, 242

Ego, 6, 7, 52

Emotion, 28, 29, 31, 33, 34, 35, 37,

78, 128
Equality, 54, 63, 64, 243

Family, 21, 22, 200
Foreigners, 246
Frenzy, 256, 259

God, 22, 183, 188, 197, 198, 199,

206, 208, 216, 224
Good (the), 70, 71, 208

Habits, 2, 5, 9, 13, 17
Humanity, 21, 22, 24, 25, 27, 44,

200, 201, 230
Hymenopterae, 17, 87, 96

Ideas (theory of), 5, 47, 48, 49,

207
Impetus: of life (vital), 44, 91, 92,

93, 95, 108, 115, 213, 236
of the artist, 60
connexion with mysticism, 181,

182
equivalent to dynamic morality,

232

insufficient, 50
of love, 79, 202
obligation deriving from, 42
Impulse, vital, 115, 116
Instinct, 16, 17, 18, 42, 77, 78, 91,

97, 100, 137, 138

Intelligence, 14, 17, 33, 34, 42, 43,
44, 50, 5i, 75, 82, 96, 97, ioo,
116, 137, 138, 174, 176, 214
Intellectualism, 29, 71, 189, 231,

261
Intuition, 94, 180, 214, 274

Judaism, 205

Justice, 54, 55, 56, 58, 59, 63, 65

KANT, u, 69, 243

Language, 18, 57
Leadership, 241
League of Nations, 248
Liberation, 39

Life, 44, 77, 82, 94, 97, 178, 180,
220, 274

277

278 SOURCES OF MORALITY AND RELIGION

Liberty, 64, 243

Love, 27, 30, 31, 81, 202, 218

Magic, 139, 141, 142, 143, 145

Mana, 112, 139, 148

Mechanics, 201, 262, 263, 265, 267,

268
Morality: of the open society, 21,

23, 24, 25, 45
of the closed society, 6, 18
relation to philosophy, 232
relation to reason, 72
relation to religion, 102
two kinds of, 25, 37, 38, 42, 233
twofold origin of, 65, 74
Movement, 45, 233
Mysteries, 185

Mysticism, 30, 68, 80, 81, 181, 182,
188, 194, 202, 203, 210, 211,
214, 251, 268, 269
Myth-making, faculty, function of,
89, 99, 103, no, 113, 138,
147, 165, 166, 167, 168, 179,
228, 231
Mythology, 88, 103

Nature, 4, 28, 30, 42, 43, 56, 234,

270
Necessity, 3, 5, 19

Obedience, 10

Obligation: binding character of, 6,

6 7

composite, 10, 65
definition of, 1 1
deriving from habits, 12
organic tendencies, 43
relation to aspiration, 51, 232
relation to instinct, 18
relation to higher morality, 22
relation to reason, 72
pressure of, 13, 15, 74, 232
sense of necessity, 519
social, 214

Organism, i, 3, 5, 18, 19, 26, 66,
93,98

Patriotism, 239

PLOTINUS, 187, 188
Population, 250, 251
Pressure, 22, 24, 42, 51, 75
Primitive: (man) (society), 19, 66,

84, 106, 113, 114, 119 ff., 126,

146

Psychology, 32, 33, 86, 88
Psychical Research, 99, 273, 274

Reason, 14, 15, 22, 47, 54, 6 9

Religion: connexion with super-
stition, 83

dual functions of, 115
dynamic, 151, 158, 171, 175
instrument of nature, 101, 102
link with open society, 5
mixed, 183

relation to intellect, 107
relation to magic, 147
relation to morality, 36, 80
social role of, 4, 168
static, 151, 158, 175

Resistance, u, 77

ROUSSEAU, 29, 30, 243

Science, 70, 142, 144, 145, 257,

259, 270
Self-respect, 53
Sensibility, 32, 33
SPENCER, 235
Sociability, 96, 232
Society: closed, 20, 21, 26, 43, 229,

237

mode of thinking, 85
open, 20, 44, 231 ^

pressure deriving from habits, i
relation to individual, 9, 14

SOCRATES, 47, 48, 49, 259

Soul, 27, 40, 45, 49, 227, 271

Spirit, 270

Stoics, 46, 47, 62

Superstition, 83

Survival (after death), no, 112

War, 44, 238, 245, 246, 247, 248
Yoga, 191

Ftinted in (hftit Hriiniu t\y U. & U. CI.AUIC, LIMITKO,